Devlog - SWAK Week 1

New year new projects, starting with the Sealed With a Kiss game jam. My wife and I started work on the project bright and early on January first. With just a few days of vacation left I wanted to get as many assets done as I could before returning to work on Monday. Which has led to creating more art in a few days than any period last year.

The speed won’t last though. I got through most of the character art but now I’m mostly left with backgrounds and I probably won’t be able to get through more than one of those every few days. So far 5-8 hours seems like the average time they requires. But we’ll see how the next week goes, for now, it’s recap time.

Asset creation

We had the basics of our game flow and story figured out before we started so I was able to get a pretty solid list of “to-do” work ready before day one. Characters were the priority as they take more than just drawing time but also programming time. So if I could get the characters done quickly it would give my wife more time to work with them in Ren’py.

I was able to get basic sketches down for each of the 4 main characters on day one which felt like an accomplishment and was already faster than I had planned for.

Aside from characters and backgrounds we also had some smaller assets that were needed. A wand for our energy mechanic, a large book for light novel scenes. It’s unlikely that we’ve reached the end of assets and new ones will continue to arise over the next few weeks. The asset tracker Total has already increased since I took that screenshot...

Characters

After the first sketches I let the characters sit for a day before returning to them. Art Director Wife wanted our main character to look a little more "student struggling" so I spent time revisiting her. Other characters had smaller fixes up I worked on during second passes. 7 days in and I think we have most of the final details for our cast.

Their designs are a mix of D&D inspo meets Montreal in the 80s. I spent a fair bit of time scrolling through 80s fashion and trying to find a unique look for each of them. But then I remembered we set the story in December so everyone needs a jacket layer for being outside :| The scope just keeps growing.

Backgrounds

I haven’t done too much work on backgrounds yet but I have made the promising discovery of the default Pointillism brush in CSP. We had envisioned a slightly more abstract or impressionistic backgrounds and I wasn’t sure how to approach this. I spent a decent amount of time just testing brushes to find something pleasing to work with and look at. It’s worked for the one background that has a lot of plants and snow, now I’ll just hope it can hold up in backgrounds that have more buildings.

Indoor scenes will be another whole thing. I don’t think pointillism will work as well there so I expect a decent amount of trial and error. So far I only have this computer background which still needs a fair bit of work but I wanted to get it in early since it’s a big part of the game.

An additional added goal to backgrounds is having a day and night version of each scene. Ren’py has some shaders which can be applied to backgrounds and images on top of backgrounds which give a lot of options. But for outdoor scenes I’m going to try to do 2 versions of each:

Also, a huge shout out to the Clip Studio Asset store. Everyone sharing assets is saving me hours of work, just some great stuff in there.

The game so far

While I’ve been fully focused on art assets my wife has been tackling everything else about the game. Launch screen, writing, sound effects, menus, energy mechanic, multiple text areas, music, assigning assets. Basically just everything.

As of today, the 8th, we’re almost done with day 1 of gameplay/story. This means written scenes and mechanics. There are still some missing key backgrounds, like our main character's room. We have some placeholder graphics in there currently for those. Once we have day 1 story all in place we’ll start sharing the game with some folks and try to get some feedback in hopes of actioning it before we get too far into day 2!