First piece of concept art for a personal project of mine ! I'm usually not to good at committing to one project but I really want to see this one through, so I'm gonna try to post about my advancement on it as much as I can to try and keep myself motivated.
As it stands I envision this project as a game of some kind. Though I'm still not decided on what kind of game, like visual novel, rpg, ect. I also have no experience in game making so that will probably be something I have to get around to learning sooner rather than later lol, but nothing worth doing comes without challenges, right ? That's the attitude I want to keep for this project anyway. As of right now I'll focused on the part I'm good at, drawing, concept art, flushing out my story as much as possible, that kinda thing.
Anyways, I won't be sharing too much of the plot because that would spoil the theoretical game, but here's my first official character design for it, a character I'm simply naming Mother for now for secret plot reasons lol. I quite like this design, though as any piece of concept art as early as this one it's liable to change in the future for any number of reasons, plot related, media related or just because I wake up one day and decide I want to take a different approach to the design, all par for the course when you're making something from scratch.
While I can't say much about the character herself for spoiler reasons, I can talk a bit about my inspirations for this project. Firstly, why I'm making it a video game in the first place as opposed to the infinitely easier option of making it a comic or something ? Well, you see, I happened to be one of those gen Z kids whose parents let loose on the internet perhaps a taaad too early; and while that probably wasn't the best thing for me in hindsight, it allowed me to grow up in the grand era of ✨RPG maker horror games✨ if you know, you know.
I grew up with a lot of the classics like Mad father, The strange man series, freaking Ao Oni, you name it, I knew it. These kind of games were my introduction to horror media as a whole, and while in the light of hindsight, they weren't usually high tier fiction, I still look back at a lot of these games with a lot of fondness, and horror is to this day, one of my favourite genres of media because of them.
Later on in my life I would engage with other types of horrors like movie and comics, and I love those as well don't get me wrong, and I do still get inspiration from a lot of them, but video game horror has and will always be my favourite way to engage with the genre, indie games especially, I've always had a soft spot for. Titles like Mouthwashing, Iron lung, Fear and Hunger (which you can probably tell I take a lot of inspiration from in my creature designs lol) are just some of my favourite exemples of recent(ish) games I love just as much as little me loved those classic RPG maker games.
So yeah I think you get the point by now, I love horror games, horror games are a big part of my childhood and a big part of my adulthood. And this is why I really want to make my own, even though I know nothing about making games lol. I've toyed with the idea of making my own game for years at this point, cycled through a bunch of different ideas but could never find one that could really keep my interest. But this project is different, it's based off of things that are deeply personal to me, and rather than losing interest in it after a month or so, this story has been worming its way further and further into my heart ever since I've first thought of it.
So yeah, I'm pretty hopeful about this. Realistically it will take at least a few years for this to come to fruition, and there's a lot of things I have to learn and hurdles I have to cross to make this a reality. But even if the end result isn't perfect, I will do my absolute best to make it come true anyway.
If you've listened to me yap this long, or even paused to look at this post at all, thank you. I only ramble on this much when I'm truly invested in something, so hopefully this is a good sign for my motivation lol. I don't have any sort of schedule for working on this project specifically but will try to upload as much of my progress as possible. So look forward to it !