Choosing a Script

The project assignment was to adapt a screenplay of our choice, written by our peers in a previous project. Any medium was on the table, so my team assembled to develop a point-and-click adventure game. We chose to adapt The Innocent’s Descent by Anica Li and Justin Chan due to the explorative potential in a journey through Hell.

Building a New Hell

Right away, we assembled reference images of how we imagined the tone and style of the world and characters. Everyone in the team had some background in visual art, so at this early stage everyone wanted a say in the visual language. When I was put on as lead artist, my first task was to identify and consolidate recurring elements and design styles into a cohesive, distinct visual language. They key features I pinned down were heavy, dominating silhouettes, clear colour coding and a limited palette. Furthermore, since I was adapting this to a game, I decided to give Hell a more organic, rougher feel that suited more variety beyond arbitrarily separated rocky wastelands.

What Colour is Death?

The most identifiable visual element of The Innocent’s Descent is its use of colour. Red was the baseline for Hell and all of its native entities. Rodion, the protagonist, is purple to represent his liminality. Valgavoth, Hell’s ruler, is a warm off-white to represent a being not native to this world but adopts it as best it can. René, Rodion’s lover, by contrast, is made up of blues and whites to resemble a ghost, someone completely out of place and perhaps intangible. Establishing this language first cut a large part of the design process down, so I could streamline asset output during development.

Rerouting Priorities

Despite officially just being the lead artist, I found myself stretched thin. Having learned how to use GDevelop (the initial proposal was to hardcode everything in HTML, which I didn’t see going well), I was doing the bulk of the programming in the first two weeks. Additionally, due to a lack of clear direction, I was intuitively designing the sprites based on my interpretation of the script, which meant working on the narrative and gameplay loop as well. This came to a head when it became clear that my idea of an engaging experience did not align with our narrative lead and producer. I recognized that reworking what we made would take less time than continuing to have directional conflicts, so I stepped back from creative and technical oversight to focus on drawing and animation. I communicated this to my producer, then told them that I need a list of assets to be done. Under new, focused direction, the project pivoted to a more straightforward visual novel. Once I got what I needed, I got to work and fully invested in asset protection. This yielded a more focused direction and involvement from my colleagues, and I was able to spend time to fully hand-animate instead of simple transform tool tricks, including fully animated ending cutscenes.

Although I’m proud of my slice of the work in the final product, I still view this project as a cautionary tale. There was a combination of misaligned vision, unclear direction and imbalanced skillsets that led to a game that didn’t quite meet internal expectations.

Learning to Walk I: The Script

We impulsively decided on a script half an hour after team formation. The Innocent’s Descent had immediate appeal for its surreal and evocative imagery and classical structure of a journey divisible into distinct sections. However, once the ball was rolling and assets were well under way, fundamental issues with the script in a gameplay context became clear. Chief among these were the lack of protagonist agency and verbose, flowery approach to physical descriptions. This necessitated a complete overhaul of story direction, stretching out ideation by several days. This experience highlighted the importance of intentionality when deciding on a concept, of considering the strengths and weaknesses of several different ideas.

Learning to Walk II: The Team

The same theme of impulsive decision making extended to deciding team member roles. In my case, I was put on as lead artist under the assumption that some sprite work could be offloaded to other members, who all had visual art backgrounds. However, I discovered too late that my style wasn’t easily replicable, which in addition to the volume of content, led to severe crunch and an imbalanced workload on my end. Sometimes, what seems like the best option at first will close doors on project-saving opportunities in the future.

Order of Operations

The Innocent’s Descent was vital for me to understand a proper game development pipeline, because we didn’t follow one at all. We never greyboxed levels or worked out the technical side of interaction before visual assets were finished, which resulted in me inadvertently influencing the overall game design. I had to finish the environment sprites before the implementation team could act, which meant increased time pressure and less polished work. Furthermore, without details of required assets to go on it largely became dependant on my interpretation of the script. It was essentially a backwards process of me making art, and the team figuring out what to do with it. If I were to do this again, I would ensure that the level is complete and playable before going ahead with the artwork.

Thinking Like a Designer

The only idea worth getting attached to is a solid product. A character trait, a design or a narrative beat could be the most gratifying, personally appealing thing in the world, but the question ultimately comes down to whether it serves the overall production effectively and feasibly. Initially, I was invested in the idea of a Myst-style puzzle game where the story is entirely told in gameplay and a bleakly humorous tone. However, the nature of the script and the producer’s vision required that we take a more direct approach. I was never tasked with designing gameplay to begin with, so in retrospect it would have been wiser to trust the process.

Once I had decided how the game would look, I got started on a guide in our shared Figma document. This served as the primary outline both the technical and artistic requirements of ingame assets.