Introducing Unmasked

It’s a new year, so let’s talk about a new project that I’m working on! If you follow me on social media, you’ll probably have seen me talk about this project already, but I thought it would be insightful to go deeper into Unmasked and what I’ve been creating for it on here.

Unmasked is a narrative-focused, 2D adventure game in which you play as a maskless girl in a beautiful but divided world populated by masked people. We are a team of 3 people working on the game, so it’s super small, which in all honesty, for what we are trying to achieve and what we have between us, can only be a good thing in my opinion, sometimes it’s nice to stay small, especially while you still can.

I am creating pretty much all of the 2D art for the game, and so far it’s been a lot of fun, and a bit of a struggle! I’ve been super busy these last couple of months since we got started for various reasons, however a few things have fallen into place which will allow me to devote much more time into creating new work for Unmasked and to really push it forward visually. So far, I’ve mainly been creating concept art for Unmasked and developing unique ideas for the world itself. Our main character is a young girl named Alana, so for now we’ve mainly been focusing on her and her home world so that we can develop the style of the game, test our ideas and move forward from there.

Alana

As I mentioned our main protagonist is a young girl called Alana with her own unique backstory (which I don’t want to spoil for anyone!), that has resulted in her wanting to keep her face covered as much as possible at all times. Each member of the team is already influenced by their own favourite games, each one bringing different ideas to the style and theme of the game,  so because of all of the discussions we have had, we already knew how we wanted Alana to look visually.

I started to sketch out some ideas, I tried to stick to the ideas we had for Alana whilst also thinking about her possible functionalities in the game, which is a really important part of when you’re designing a character, don’t be afraid to add your own ideas in, even if it wasn’t asked of you (just make sure you can remove them if needed). When I was designing her cloak for example, I tried to think about how it might have been original made, how it might tie together, who might have made it, could it have possibly been damaged previously when she’d been wearing it etc.? The more you can delve into a characters history, the better. I also tried to think about what trinkets she might have picked up on previous adventures and how she might carry things around with her. 

You can also watch me developing Alana’s design in the video below.

This probably won’t be the absolute final design for Alana, we just wanted to get something in place, so I’m definitely looking forward to being able to explore her design more in the next couple of months. Now onto the environment!

Alana’s home village

Something that I’ve never been good at is designing environments, not because I’m generally just not good at it, but just because I’ve never really worked at it long enough to become good at it, so I’ve really been trying to practice these past couple of weeks. I’ve been doing some studying on it as I’ve been practising and definitely have a lot more to do, but it’s fun to see my work improving again and I’ll only learn more as time goes on.

Due to this being the first time I’d really designed any kind of world as a whole, I really wanted to give myself some limits to make it easier on myself, and so that I didn’t have to many elements or themes to create ideas from. As I mentioned we are starting with Alana’s home village, the team had previously discussed Alana’s home village possibly being set in a sort of rainforest-type environment so one idea I had was if it was an old abandoned fishing village that people had inhabited again and rebuilt houses from the materials that were lying around.

One thing I was really struggling with initially was the design of the houses themselves, it seemed natural to start by designing the houses, but the problem was that each house looked completely different, and ideally I wanted each house to be unique in it’s own right, but I also wanted all of the houses to be tied together somehow. I created this mock up of the level and that’s when the problem really became visible. When I decided to make the environment an old abandoned fishing village, I figured I could work with a theme of making each house sort of look like the shape of an old boat, or it would at least be built from boat parts, so that’s what I decided to work with.

I still ran into some problems in the beginning, but I spent a couple of hours gathering reference and doing some studies and that in itself enabled me to build up my creative bank account a little and give myself some literal building blocks for each house. I used these pieces as either main parts of the houses or little accessories and I think that they work really nicely. Something I’ve also learned about designing environments is making sure it has a feeling of being lived in (unless it’s not supposed to!) so I added things like little lanterns and hand painted symbols or numbers to help to add to that, although I’d like to build on these details a lot in the future. 

You can watch a video of me creating the houses and talking about my process below too.

I’m sure you can see from these pieces of concept art that it’s very different to my usual style. I’ve been trying to develop some different styles and workflows when it comes to concept art, once I’ve developed it into something a little more streamlined I’ll write a blog post about that too. 

I don’t want to give too much away right now, but I will be talking more about Unmasked over the whole of this year. If you’d like to stay up to date on the game feel free to give us a follow @Unmaskedgame or follow me @aldersaur .