Flatwoods - A Post-mortem Pt02
DEVELOPMENT Pt02 - From These Seeds a Lemon Grows
So who do I make Flatwoods about? The original urban legend has a tonne of different people involved and I didn’t want to be using anyone’s real names. That said, one of the teens who allegedly saw the monster that night was called Eugene 'Gene' Lemon, and when I saw that last name, I knew I had to use it. Of course in real life Eugene was a human, but due to the squat nature of most of my character designs, making Lemon into a... well... Lemon, made sense.
In the urban legend Eugene was about 17 years old, and this is where I wanted to diverge a bit. I grew up as a kid in the country. Behind my parents home was a massive hill that had a plateau on top that seemed to go on forever.
I spent a lot of time as a kid alone and exploring the forests, the more open areas, the dams, there was just a tonne to do and see up there. Despite the fact that I don’t think West Virginia and where I grew up in rural Australia have much in common, I wanted to try to make a game that in some way recaptured the feeling of exploring that environment as a kid, using the story of the Flatwoods Monster as a back drop. This is also why you as a player never know anymore than Lemon does in game, I feel like when I was a kid I would just find random things up on that hill and just make up my own stories about how they got there or what they were. This is what lead to the weird pieces of metal in the game. While I wouldn’t say I put much of myself into Lemon, I did want to make him relatable, especially to anyone who did similar things as a kid.
Once I new the game was going to focus on Lemon, next up was the design. I actually started with the sprite first as it was the newest element to me in terms of experience. I wanted the game to have a Game Boy Color aesthetic (something I will talk about in a future post) and I wanted his sprite to be the same size as a standard sprite from say the Pokemon or Zelda series on Game Boy. This lead to his 16x16 design.
Once the sprite was finished (I don’t think I ever changed it from what was supposed to be the first draft...) it was time to design him for what would later turn out to be the animated cutscenes. While I only ever really did one rough piece of concept art, it was enough to give me a rough idea of what he would look like through the game. I have never really been great at drawing the same character the same way twice and it really shows in the animated scenes for Flatwoods. I don’t his animation is on model once, and im fine with that.
I was pretty happy with the initial design, it was perhaps a little plain, but it was a good starting point. Outside of a couple anonymous messages telling me I only drew “mayonnaise characters”, a term I had to look up because I was unfamiliar with (and a rather odd claim against someone who draws mostly odd colored monsters and Muppet type characters) his design was relatively well received. With just a small amount of refinement we ended up with a very polished iteration as you see below.
By this point I would say the design was 90% there. Once animation started I realized I was using a more rough edged aesthetic on the line work, so I had to go back and redesign Lemon slightly for the portraits. His nose was the only other big change from this design to the final design.
I feel like I sort of did things backwards, I imagine most people would design the character before they made any sprites, and thats exactly what i did for the other characters in Flatwoods, but that’s a story for tomorrow.
