I worked on a few sprites for Jack and Casie, but none of them really made it into the current iteration, since the top-down style town maps got dropped in favor of the much more efficient visual novel style map screen. I thought I'd talk about the process. I think I learned a lot about pixel art, so I'm really happy about the work I did, though honestly none of my work is very impressive.
Shout would send me rough concept sketches and I'd try to make it into a pixel sprite matching the style of the existing Jack and Casie sprites he'd made. I got to just kind of choose the colors for a lot of them, and Shout kept most of those colors with slight edits. I think that's about the extent of my influence that's left in the final project lol. (Incidentally, most of these colors are just chosen from the existing sprites anyways.)
My very first attempt was pretty hilarious-- I just drew whatever the fuck, and Shout was like "wait why didn't you follow the concept art" before I realized he meant I should be doing pixel versions of the exact poses he sent. The first one, Wren, was REALLY ROUGH... so much back and forth. (I'm not even going to show them all because they're so embarrassing.) After I worked on a few more sprites, I eventually went back to Wren and made a decent pass that Shout could finally actually use.
I wasn't confident I could learn anti-aliasing, so I left that kind of stuff up to Shout. I apparently saved him about an hour of work, but on my end... lol... I'd say each sprite took me a few hours and back and forth with Shout, but I was getting faster with every sprite I worked on at least?
With Mrs. Parker we had a lot of back and forth... looking back, since Mrs. Parker is supposed to be a tired older woman, it was hard to not make her e_e face look like bedroom eyes. ...or an “emo rich kid”. It was also hard to get across her bunny ears looking like bunny ears instead of just weird hair. (I mean, it’s SUPPOSED to look like hair, too... but it’s a lot harder than cat ears!)
By the time I worked on Baley, I was a little less shy about asking Shout for more clarifications on character designs. I was also kind of getting a feel for what I call “Shoutisms”-- tendencies he has in designs, the “house style” for Jack and Casie characters, etc. I started drawing what my interpretation of his quick concept sketches looked like in order to make it faster to clarify character designs with him as well. (For the record, I’m much better at full res illustration than I am at pixel art.)
I’ll let Shout post all the unused overworld tilesets and sprites he probably has... I just wanted to talk about the stuff I worked on. Even though none of this in particular is going into the final product, I learned quite a bit crash coursing pixel art with Shout, and I hope some of the stuff I’m working on now might make it in.
