So rather than make this a typical post where it’s just me posting the artwork I decided that for this particular section I’m going to talk about the process that I went through with Team Netalia to help them with their Senior Capstone project over at NYU. Adam Goren approached me about the opportunity and since I was looking to hone in on bettering my animation skills and thought it would be interesting to work on a metroidvania game with a ton of cyberpunk elements, I joined in on the project.
Since I was working very closely with the team to help get everything to look at their best, the process was actually very team oriented in of itself as you will see as I take you through some of the earlier concepts, the sprites, and the backgrounds themselves.
Originally, these were the concepts that I initially thought of when the character description was first introduced. However, these were ultimately scrapped due to Netalia needed to look more feminine. Eventually we looked into a few sci-fi cartoons and learned about Aeon Flux and took a bit more inspiration from that particular series and had that influence the design. As seen here.
The next thing we had to do was translate this look into pixel art sprites.
While this was what I ended up creating from the concept work, the problem with these sprites were that they became too angular due to the size. So we ended up shrinking them down to 32×32 and came up with silhouetted sprites as well.
Eventually, this was the look that we settled with and these sprites are ultimately what helped dictate what the characters would look like over time.
However, remaining mainly black and white for these sprites posed another problem that we eventually had to work around with the backgrounds. Rather than make the backgrounds in 1-bit black and white we eventually decided to have the backgrounds have color in them since we had a lighting mechanic that was included to help give more distinction between the characters and the BGs
And there you have it! Overall, this was a fun project that I had the opportunity to work on with Team Netalia and it taught me a lot about what goes into game development.
With that in mind, all the assets that are seen here will be posted in both the Digital Art and Character Designs pages where appropriate for said works. I hope that you enjoyed reading this little informative section on the artistic process that went into this game!
Andrew Orluk 