Hi there! Today I decided to do a little post about the art & story of The Consequences of Gardening.
First of all, a quick word on how the team came to be, and how we chose what the game would be.
Team
Kalarth, Thorqueor and I are friends from University, and we followed a Game Design course together few years ago. We worked on couple jam projects too. Maus3r came to work with us in a jam last year, I knew him from Flying Oak Games Discord server. The idea of doing the jam came from him, and we decided to all join as a team. Eqkter, also a friend from Uni, who I've been giving feedback to for few tracks in the past couple weeks joined the team as well, bringing his sound designer friend Moondude along. Kebab, latest addition to the big team, worked in the same room as a few of us during a jam few months ago, and we were keen on working with the young talented dev.
Organization
We had a pre-jam reunion talking about global organisation, what everyone's working habits were, how we would work, and what we were expecting of the 72 hours. Since all of us didn't know all of the others, we introduced our backgrounds in turns, had a round of questions, and a little explanation on what role we would play (music composition, sound design, level design, art, or dev), and how we wanted to handle the jam. The goal was to produce a game while still enjoying nice breaks and sleeping (almost) normally. Going in chill. We would think of ideas on our own, then meet for a brainstorming session on Saturday at 9am BST - 10am for the majority of the team in France, 9 for me in the UK, but far too early for Moondude in Canada, so he left his ideas in written form, then joined us when waking up later in the day.
We had written most ideas we had had during the night, and we set out on what to go for rather quickly. In an hour, we had chosen a setting, the kind of gameplay, and what the devs would need to do - each dev focusing on one important part of the code. We seperated to work on our own at that point, regularly exchanging on the direction and vision other had for this or that. I acually spent most of the week-end drawing while listening to Eqkter streaming the tracks he was composing.
Story
As stupid as it may sound, the main concept behind the game was this article about a young lad with tons of plants, and being torn between a very cute little plant-watering simulator or a gory game where you have to keep a demonic-looking thing alive by feeding it all sorts of things - people being an option. We eventually went for both, but the watering the plant part was sadly not added. To make a gameplay that works well in a short amount of time, we discarded anything nervously dynamic, and looked at more posed gameplays like puzzle, strategy or management.
There, we had the baseline. Old-school point-&-click with inventory system, dialogs, and things to look at & grab.
The creation process for characters was iterative and Thorqueor's ideas and mine got intertwined. I drew Kaz, the main character, and thought of what he was like. Thorqueor designed the puzzles. He also thought of chracters & their behaviors, objects, base dialogs, and what place a scene would play at. I then drew the characters, a flattened version of scenes, and worked on the pixel art version of all these.
Eqkter and I spend couple hours reworking all the dialogs, him in French, I in English, exchanging ideas on how characters would actually interact with Kaz, the main character. You read it here first : there is a full French localization for the game, we just have to figure out how to make it easier for us to implement.
Art
Here is a look at some of my scribbles. Everything was drawn on paper with a ballpoint pen - my weapon of choice for quick drawings. The process : from there to pixels, basically. The appartment was the only scene I put as much details in right from the start, with couple items chosen by each member of the team to fit in the background.
Guess which ones? :smile:
This is the base lines for the pixel art of the flat and what the flat looks like once done. I work with aseprite, in one file to have a better sense of the scale. Every element is on a different layer, making it easy to copy / paste to another file for animated or pickable objects.
Since 72h would make it a bit tight for me to be able to draw 4 scenes, animate 5 characters & a plant, and draw "HD" versions of faces for the dialog box, the ballpoint face were scanned, cleaned a bit, and kept as is.
Pixel Kaz v1 and v2. V1 did not look like I imagined, too mugshotty. Had to be more blasé, and kind of cute-ish. Despite what people might think, he lived through some shit and wasn't always like this. He just accepted the situation and now he does not care for anything else than his plants.
I'll just add a couple more sprites that you cannot see too well in the game : the icons for the different locations, and the sprites of the pickable objects (originally 50x50px).
>> Play the game here
Cheers!
J.Mad
Credits to @vinsynth & @sersie.