After finishing Stellio’s design, I spent a week or so waffling trying to figure out how to animate him before I remembered I literally have someone who studies animation working for me.
Achi is doing a BA in animation, so he and I swapped tasks– he would take care of animating Stellio while I focused on doing scenery. Sen is currently taking care of the flora, so my main goal in March was to create buildings.
There are three buildings that I wanted to put in the game: The altar the player spawns on, the ruined outpost where Stellio meets Ictus, and the castle that Stellio is heading towards.
I ended up cutting the part with the outpost due to time constraints. It’s okay, probably.
Lumiron is meant to have an underwater kind of vibe to it, so I wanted the architecture to follow suit. Aside from taking inspiration from Neo-Gothic styles as per previous posts, I also wanted things to look weightless and spiraly — like each structure is based on the shape of a sea shell.
The altar looked a lot more grand in concept sketches than the final sprite it got, mostly due to my style limitations (because I couldn’t figure out how the stairs would work in game either ahaha). I wanted it to have a flowy, somewhat organic looking shape, with the moon featured at the very top. I would have liked to add vegetation along the cracks if time permitted.
I leaned into the weightlessness of the moon with having debris floating in place instead of being piled at the bottom, making it look like it’s being held together by weak magical sources. This is something I intend to carry into other buildings in the future as well.
The rough blocking for the castle was created before any other buildings. While finalizing it into pixel art, I notice that my sense of scale seems somewhat skewed in this drawing. The connecting pieces of the castle look way smaller and lacking in details compaored to the main building, making the scaling look off and weird. I hopefully managed to mitigate this in the final version, although there are still a lot of places I want to improve on.
The color palette of the buildings are purposefully monochromatic, but it makes me wonder if adding accent colors would help with cohesion. I’d like to try adding tapestry or similar splashes of colors when i continue to develop the concepts.
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