Hi Everyone! We’d like to share a bit of process on designing the visuals of our Ludum Dare submission; バクラウ Bloodless. Check out the game on the link below;

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/bloodless

Overview

Once we agreed on the Idea we were going with, we started throwing our ideas on what story we were going to tell and then the mood started to follow and develop. We tried to not define things too strictly at this point as everything “evolved” during the development. But It’s really important to set some guidelines so you don’t get lost in the process

Someone suggested we going with black and white for colors and it matched perfectly with the mood we were going for, It kinda resembled old black-and-white samurai movies and it aligned perfectly with our ideas for the music and the game’s mood. At this point we started sketching some character ideas:

(First character sketches)

We ended up sticking with the idea of a human character and kept the bigger sprite size because of the amount of details we wanted to portray. At this point we had a very clear vision on what was going to be the main mechanic and that our character would be an old man (for story reasons). And that’s how the first “definitive” character sketch came up, along with our first enemy:

(Left = sketch; right = final version for comparisson)

At this point, we started making some stuff for environment to help us all see the bigger picture on what we were doing (visually xD)! At this point we also started laying down the character’s and enemy’s animations key poses.

:(Left = walk; right = attack preparation)

The plan was to have as much as we could ready to be implemented as placeholders so the programming and sound part of the team had more material to work with while we worked on finishing the animations and having definitive assets for the environment.

(we scraped the idea of blood on the environment after a while)

We wanted at least two kinds of backgrounds, an external environment like a garden, and an enclosed place like a dojo. So, the garden elements were easier to create, we just needed some trees and rocks, a grass tile.. But the dojo one would need some kind of walls, weapons and columns to show that it was an enclosed place.

Dojo Elements.

Also, we didn't want the game to be so serious at all, we would like to put something funny too. So, we thought the enemy animations could have something crazy when it loses the weapon or are defeated. This way we could give more personality (what a coward!) to the enemy.

These are the first finalized animations we did starting from those first key poses:

Meanwhile, our game designer was creating some cool levels using those background elements we just had finished.

Luckily, the scenario elements have matched really good with the characters.

After that we focused on finishing the remaining animations, working on the enemy variations while communicating with the rest of the team to solve any issues that appeared and getting more “juice” to the visuals xD.

Inspirations

As soon as we had the main character idea laid down (before the definitive sketches), the team agreed on the player being an elder man, tired of the violence, and who was a truly skilled fighter. I had a very clear idea of what kind of energy I wanted for it after that.

(Shin'ichi Chiba as Yagyu Jube) (Jet Black from Cowboy Bebop)

As for the game itself and it’s setting, we had a couple inspirations that are very dear to us like Rurouni kenshin (Samurai X) and most recently, Sekiro - Shadows Die Twice. Many players have made the connection with one or other of our inspirations and that felt really good, because we knew we managed to evoke some of the feelings that inspired us in the first place :D

Technical Stuff

These are more like some curiosities on the impact of some art decisions. For example, sticking with a black and white + the red to highlight important features was something that had a strong relation to the game design too. And applying that to the enemies design has this increasing presence in the enemy importance. This also took some weight off the shoulders of the art team. Originally we considered having 4-directional sprites, but this soon got dropped because of the high cost of time in production. Something that is easy to overlook is that all characters have a black outline. This can sounds kinda silly since the background is mostly black, but this ensures a better a overlapping of sprites.

(left = unreadable mess, right = Look! :O Two characters!)

Well, I guess that’s everything for today :D I hope this helped in any way or just was interesting from a curiosity point of view. We are very happy on how the game turned out and I sincerely hope we continue to bring to life other games for your amusement :B

The バクラウ Bloodless’ team wishes you all a great weekend!

Art team

Daniel Clarc (https://twitter.com/DanielClarcO) Diego Almeida (https://twitter.com/di3goalmeida)