Sorceress' Spell

Hi! I'm Joana! I make games, art, and art for games!

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A few of my best artworks from 2016 that I hadn’t posted here yet, from oldest to newest. Among them are fanart for @towerfall and Mass Effect, and some color and character design studies.

Many thanks to Jen Pattison for the amazing help she gave me on improving Rokuro, the bust in the middle. Without her it would’ve looked like a hot mess, haha.

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There has been a very big increase in games that feature animated text. It is quite useful to convey emotion and pacing in games that have no voice acting. I’ve been very interested in such a system for a long time.

So, during my summer vacation, I decided to work on a similar system for learning purposes in my spare time. As I kept sharing my development on it, people kept asking where they could get it, so I took a little extra time to polish it and make it more usable to an end user, and made it available to the comunity at large.

You can learn more about it in its dedicated page.

Right now it’s available for Unity and you can get it on Itch.io or the Unity Asset Store!

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A comission I did for David Amador for Quest of Dungeons. He comissioned me a whole redesign of the game’s interface for the Nintendo 3DS and WiiU systems!

This meant I had to keep most of the work already done in terms of colors and style, but create a whole new layout with new elements, including buttons, icons and indicators.

The layouts were completely designed from scratch except the in game top screen, wich kept the elements close to what the other versions had in order to be consistent.

Most of the elements you see here (besides the item icons and one or two others which were retouched) were made from scratch to fit the new layouts and the smaller screen of the 3DS.

The game is now available on the Nintendo Store for both consoles!

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The Summit: Post-mortem

The Summit is a game I’ve had in my head for quite a while now. It’s an homage to an adventure I played many, many years ago that I wanted to try and recreate but add my own ideas and twists.

The first attempts to make it happen were two years ago. Back then I had far less experience than I do now, but the idea was already there: different armors, classes and ethnicities. The crux of it was the customization of your character.

When I did this, I had no idea if I had the skill to make it happen, or even if it should happen.

Fast forward two years, and this idea is still in my head. I really wanted to make it happen. I had just arrived from San Francisco after visiting GDC and I was thrilled there. The whole event gave me (and my friends) a whole new prespective into our work and what it meant. Our conclusion was the same: we needed to do more, better, and more interesting.

And when LowRezJam was announced, a few days after I came back, I knew that was my chance to take a break and evaluate just where I was at in terms of proficiency and trying to do something a little more interesting. I wanted to try new things and see if I could pull them off.

But I was still unsure if I could make it happen. The whole idea of making a light action RPG seemed like a huge undertaking (and it still is) but dammit, I was so inspired, I wanted to try! And the two weeks that the jam lasted seemed like a perfect opportunity to try! A game of the calibre I was envisioning needed a bit more time than the usual weekend jam.

The idea behind the jam was to make a game in two weeks that could fit in a 64x64 pixel window. My initial mockup was a good start, but I was unsure if the characters, with their small size, could provide any interesting changes when equiped with new items. I wanted the customization to be a key part of the experience, and changing items to lead to avatar changes to reflect that.

But this posed a huge problem. These new characters had a lot of real estate for such a small screen. I struggled a lot to keep them at this size, but I ended up doing it. My desire to provide customization options won over screen space (which I told myself could fix after the jam was over if need be).

Creating the level art was relatively simple, but in the end I didn’t manage to create enough content to build interesting levels. The bulk of the art work went to the main character. 

Before delving into the main character, I quickly mocked up and programmed the simple UI. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I ended up incorporating some neat elements into it, such as having the character’s bag in the exact same place when looting and when seeing the character sheet. In the end I wish I had more UI in the game itself, but I had no time to make it happen.

The art was by far the single most time consuming task of the whole game. With 3 armors (4 if you count the initial “naked” body), 3 weapons, and 7 animations for 4 sides, I spent a whooping 5 days or more working on the art for the main character alone.

The animations were made with the customization in mind. I had a blank character that I added layers to, each representing an armor or weapon the character was wearing. I worked with my usual workflow: creating a “naked” body and adding the details and clothes later.

After trying to make animations without reference and not being able to come up with decent results, I ended up recording myself doing them. I’d do a first pass with “noodly” appendages where necessary and then build upon them.

By far the biggest improvement you can see after I tried recreating animations from recordings was in the death animation. The first one was flat and sudden, but with my new video reference, I was able to make it far smoother and more appealing.

After that, it was time to add in clothes and weapons to the animations. This was a time consuming process, due to the sheer number of animations combined with number of possible weapons and armor.

After finally finishing the main character, I worked a bit more on art for the other crucial aspects of the game’s design loop: the campfire, a place to both warm oneself up and cook, and the wolf, an enemy that would provide an opposing force and food to keep oneself from starving.

After all that art, it was “just” a matter of coding everything. I ended up meeting a few snags along the way, but mostly I was able to advance and prototype  very quickly. For example, the initial way you interacted with the campfire was rather draconic, so I ended up rewriting it due to feedback from Tiago, my friend and musician in this endeavour.

What I ended up with was a game that far exceeded my expectations of what I could do. Tiago absolutely blew it out of the park with the music as well. It is moody and fits the whole theme of the game fantastically. I dare say it made the game 10x better than it could’ve been.

People commenting on the jam during the voting period ended up confirming my suspicions about the game’s reception, especially in terms of character size and problems that arose from that fact.

But, in the end, I am realy proud of what I was able to accomplish with two weeks of work. There are a few things I wish I had time to do (as it so often happens in jams), but overall I think I built a solid game that has a foundation to become something more.

I am so pumped in fact, I’m actually thinking of pursuing this further as soon as I have time on me to do it. The ideas are running in my head as I write this and it’s an awesome feeling.

I can’t wait for that time to come.

PS: A huge thank you to everyone who encouraged me while I was doing this. Special shout outs go to the art channel over at Zack Bell’s slack. Two of the game’s random names ended up being from there, from two awesome ladies who I would forever regret not meeting: Jen and Clarissa! Thank you so much for your continued support, and stay awesome! ❤

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LowRezJam 2016 ran for the last two weeks (with this week being the voting period), and I had the urge to participate with a very old idea!

The Summit is an action game, with some elements borrowed from survival games and RPGs. The game takes place at the summit of a mountain, where a horrible battle took place. Your company is dead, but your target is nowhere to be found. It’s up to you, the sole survivor, to brave the dangers of the summit to find her, while surviving the ferocious animals, crippling cold and natural hunger.

You can play it directly in your browser or download it over at itch.io!

Hope you enjoy playing it as much as I did working on it!

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As a final update today, I have very exciting news! I’ll be attending the Game Developer’s conference for the first time this year to show off Super Nanny Sleepytime, which won a spot on GameJolt’s booth!

Most of the team will be there so if you’re attending GDC, search for us! :D

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The animation on Princess Canary was fairly fast to make. After I rigged all the characters in engine, Frederico helped me out a bit by making Princess Canary’s running animation and Prince Cardinal’s idle and fall (I gave him a simple sketch of what I had in mind for reference). Here are Princess Canary’s and Perilous Cunning’s animations I did. The latter ended up not being used on the jam version, but they may return on a post jam update.

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One of the things I promised myself for this last Global Game Jam was that I wanted to get away from Pixel Art. I’m already doing far too many games in pixel art as it is. It’s not that I don’t like it anymore (I mean, Torn is my baby and it’s still very much pixel art, and I’ll get some updates on it soon!), I just wanted a breath of fresh air!

Another thing I wanted to try was 2D skeletal animation. I’ve been inspired for quite a while to mimic the beautiful styles of Aquaria and Vanillaware’s games Odin Sphere and Oboro Muramasa. I have tried before with Candy Gulp, but I never finished the game.

One day I’ll tackle a full 2D (non pixel) art game with skeletal animation, but for now, I got my fix with Princess Canary!

I didn’t have a lot of time to make very fancy art (being two days and all), and after the first day I realized that making the polished art I was expecting would take far too long. So I decided to take an easier approach with the tools I had at my disposal: Vector Art! I penciled the characters in a drawing notebook, took photos of them with my phone, uploaded them to my computer and worked on them on Inkscape!

It took a while to find out a style I was happy with, and in the end I went for flat colors to be able to work faster. Princess Canary ended up being a lot different from her sketch (mainly her wings and a shorter torso) because of this. Once I had a style in place, the other 2, Prince Cardinal and Perilous Cunning, were far more straight-forward.

Even so, making this type of art ended up being very costly in terms of time. Splitting the body parts and making smooth joints is by far the hardest part, and some of them were less than perfect as a result.

We ended up not putting the Perilous Cunning in because it took me so long to make the assets. There wasn’t enough time to put it in and hook it to the rest of the game, even though I had made some animations for it already. She was supposed to be the “antagonist” on each level, singing against Princess Canary to prevent her from escaping! But we were still able to include the two most important characters to tell the story in. The Perilous Cunning will probably be back once we get around to making a version outside of the jam!

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Global Game Jam #16 was just last month and I participated again, of course!

The result is Princess Canary, a rhythm game where you play as the titular character, who sings her way out of a tower before the prince has a chance to rescue her. She’s far too stubborn and strong to be at the whims of some prince!

Get the executable to play at the Global Game Jam site (only available on Windows at the moment)!

I hope you like it!

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And here’s the art I got back from the December Secret Fan! More Torn, of course!

First one was my Secret Santa @dyla24 and it’s awesome! The sisters sure got into some holiday cheer! I love the way she interpreted the dynamic between the two of them with a Christmas song! Super clever! Huge thank you to her!

And the second one was a nice gift from Fred yet again! He’s the best! Can you see that improvement in such a short time? I’m amazed and proud!

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Another year, another 3D model! This was done for another art exchange between Portuguese gamedevs! I got Chicken Tumble by Indot this time!

This was my first try at Low Poly 3D ever, and it turned out better than I expected! I’ve been wanting to try this style out, and finally got a good excuse! @fi3d helped me by giving me some tips too! (Go check her stuff out, she’s awesome!)

Also, I used the Pico 8 palette to try it out and I think it fits really well!

You can see the model without the sky color on Sketchfab. It even got Staff Picked! What a way to end the year!

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So, what have I been doing?

Between all the Nanny Sleepytime shenanigans I’ve been up to recently, I haven’t updated Torn very much. But I’m back to some good old dev’ing, so hopefully I’ll have something else to show soon!

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to find colors palettes for both sides of the game. It’s a though call, and I’m not sure I’ll follow through with what I have here. I’ve been experimenting for quite a while, so I decided to put this on pause until I have a more fleshed out demo. This is the kind of stuff I can sort out later.

What do you guys think?

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Here’s the last Art Update for today! I have one more to post, but that one is GameDev related, promise!

Here are a few sketches I’ve been doing in the past weeks whenever I’m feeling inspired. I tried not to take too long to make them (usually between half an hour to one hour, tops).

Top row is one of the sisters from Torn. I wasn’t trying to concept anything, really, just trying to make art again. I liked it enough to keep on going!

Bottom left is Haruna from Blue Fire, a project I’ve been dreaming to do for a while (if you’ve been following the blog you may have seen her before). Her face took quite a while, but it’s the closest I’ve managed to get to an Asian face (If you saw the last drawing I did of her you’d know real fear. That thing was NASTY!)

Bottom right is Eir from @funpunch‘s Striker’s Edge. I just felt inspired to draw her! I really need to practice painting hair more though, haha!

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And here’s what I got in return for that Art Exchange I posted earlier! Tiago Franco, one half of @funpunch, did a very spiffy drawing of one of the characters from Torn! And I absolutely love it!

Be sure to check their blog as well! They’re developing a very cool game called Striker’s Edge I’m sure you guys will like! The second one was an extra I got from our programmer at Space Pajamas Frederico Sousa!

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I was looking through my art and figured I haven’t posted a few of my latest sketches! This one is nearly 3 months old haha.

This was for a art exchange and I got Toy Shop Tycoon! This is Mel, one of the main characters.

I experimented a lot with this one. Decided to give Cel Shading a try again but tried to include some gradients to see how it would turn out. Not bad! The drawing’s kinda slapdash (I had a bunch of stuff to do at the time, like I always do), but it was really fun to make!

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Tried to help out a friend come up with a Vampire design for an idle game sprite. The design was inspired by Castlevania Concept Art (as asked), and had to be 32x32 pixels.

He ended up not needing it, so here it is!

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It’s been a while since I updated the blog!

Still working on Torn! Besides a huge tweak to area generation using templates (which I will probably write about later), this month I’ve been focusing on updating the game to incorporate the most crucial aspect of the game that has been missing for so long: the duality of the two sisters.

In the game, you’ll control the two sisters at the same time, and you guide them through two worlds that initially seem very alike, but will show their differences over time.

I also worked on the Dialogue windows! They are usually split, but will merge into one another when characters on both sides say the same thing!

All in all, exciting progress! I may have a playable second demo with a vision much closer to the final game sooner than I imagined!