HELLO!! First update: Sprites and Background

Hello! I'm Francisco, lead artist on this project, but people call me Maki after I arrogantly named myself that way, so please call me Maki.

I, along with Waru from UlpoMedia are adapting the sci-fi romance story of The Dandelion Girl, written by Robert F Young in the 60s, as a Kinetic Novel which is a Visual Novel without choices, crazy huh. If you haven't read it, please do! its only 11 pages long and very easy to find online!

We've been thinking of this idea for YEARS now, in fact, the first designs are from 2019, here's a turnaround I did now almost 4 years ago by now.

From the beginning, I went away with the description of the book and added a sun hat, which with time got bigger and bigger cuz I like big hats (any witch fans over here?)

Life always gets in the way, and I constantly wanted to improve my skills to do a better product, but eventually I realized nothing will be done unless I actively try to do it. So I saved some money, grabbed Waru forcefully and told him "WE ARE DOING THIS NOW" 

So since 2022 I was working with some sprite ideas before coming up with this:

And even animated them!

(Don't know how to make it smaller, sorry Uu)

I've been trying this style without any lineart whatsoever and felt this rough look would be perfect to give this a unique look. So I decided to go with it for all the stuff I'll do from now on this project. So what you're seeing now is basically how the sprites will look. Also wanted to make the characters more in line with my new style.

...Then the backgrounds, thank god I didn't go seriously with this project in 2019 since my backgrounds were atrocious, luckily with the years I went more and more into worldbuilding and trying to construct stuff that gave me a better idea of how to do it.

For this project, I decided to start with blender to have a better idea of space and proportion, made a little cabin idea based on some references, and tried some lights. This cabin is one the protagonist stays in its vacation and many of his ponderings and thoughts will happen here. Of course, this game will have many other locations.

I modeled everything with the objective of using such figures as shape blackouts to color later, also the light tests were very useful to figure out how the light will pass through windows and complicated shapes!

So here are the results of my first week working full time on the project:

So many talking to reach this point and don't have anything else to say. so far the simple style is making things very quick to do, the original idea was to make lineart for everything and such but that would have been a mess.

If you read the novel already you might think it looks so modern compared with the original description! Well it actually is, we decided to go for a modern setting for the story, the original happens in the 60s and things have changed a lot, so much of the general life stuff feels too old fashioned to be relatable nowadays, so we kept the core story but changed the year from the 60s to the 2020s

And with that bombshell, that's it for this week! I'll leave with an old sketch of Julie since I think it's cute. 

See ya!