Visuals – Background, in front of the school

Hello everybody,

For this new post, I would like to present you another background. So, it would be present at the end of the demo. It’s the oustide of the school. Before going to school, Kafka will see the outside and so a big place with some people working this morning like factory worker or some peasants.

For the moment, you’ll see just the background. Now, if you go to Prague, you’ll find the Kinsky palace which was at the end of the 19th century a school where Kafka went. Two pictures to see this background, the black and white version and the version with colors.

Visuals – Background, a street

Hello everybody,

Today I would like to talk about another background. I don’t want to say a lot about it so I’ll focus your attention on the evolution of the background. From the sketch to the final version. As you can see, create a background is always a struggle. You want a style and some effects but as this step of the game development we have to be careful and respect the precedent backgrounds. You can’t change, of course, the style at any moment of your game. Except if it’s your goal because your story needs that. Well, it’s not our case.

So, here you can see a typical street of the old Prague.

First the ink with Painter, very useful to create that.

A second version, maybe too clean

The last version with some new features and effects.

. Version française :

Bonjour tout le monde,

Aujourd’hui, je voudrais vous parler d’un nouveau background. Je ne veux pas trop en dire donc je me focaliserai sur l’évolution de ce background. Du dessin préparatoire à la version finale. Comme vous pouvez le voir, dessiner un background est complexe. En plus d’une documentation importante et prenante, il faut conserver le style du jeu. Aucun changement en cours, sauf si votre histoire l’impose. Il est donc difficile de garder une cohérence. De plus, réaliser un background nécessite du temps, du dessin préparatoire, le crayonné, à l’encrage à la colorisation pour finir par les effets.

Voici une rue typiquement praguoise.

 

Visuals : The colors as a vector of the meaning of the game

Hello everybody,

Because it’s the beginning of this blog, I would like to share with you some pictures of the first steps of our development. As you know, the game was originally created with the software Ren’Py. A very interesting tool to create visual novels. The aesthetics at this moment was pretty simple : already a cartoon style but a choice of three colors : white, grey and black.

The goal was to create an atmosphere with the story, the dialogs, of course, but also with these graphic elements. It’s so important to immerge the gamer since the beginning in your world and the choice of the colors could help with that. For us, it was a strange world without vivid colors that creates a feeling of uniformity.

Now, the choice is to use vivid colors but for the skin we continue to have a kind of grey to avoid the “pink” of the skin or a too realistic color for us because we want to respect the strangeness of the Kafka’s world. And, by the way, a brown filter will appear progressively and makes all the game look more and more sad as the mental health of the character is. So, we continue to use the colors as a vector of the meaning of the game but…differently.