Artist and Animator
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From Dusk Till Dawn was a product of a week long design challenge where I was honored with given the lead art role. For me this was the first time I felt like I was deserving of an artistic role since 6 out of the 8 members of my team were artists. We held a competition of sorts, in hopes to select the best artist for the position. I felt that there were other artists best suited for the position but my peers assured me that I was the right fit, and for that I will always be grateful.
Our main Character
Starting with the player character, our team wanted to feature a child character to help immerse the player into a horrific environment. Having a young child defenseless in this scenario was what we felt best fit our criteria. Additionally, we also wanted to feature a pixel art aesthetic for our game. I looked into some references on google and the type of clothing that typical children would wear, Eventually I stumbled upon the Netflix show "Hilda". I really liked the main character and looked into 80 and 90s child wear. I wanted to have rainboots, and a sweater in response to my inspiration and to reflect the outside world of the game. The attire was meant to make players think of the fall season and in turn, Halloween.
The look and feel
The next steps were to research creating the right setting. I wanted to achieve something spooky, so I started off with looking into images of old abandoned spaces; houses, apartment buildings, stores and factories and so on. Eventually, I also looked into popular horror games to look for some inspiration. I looked into the game "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" in particular for its creepy atmospheric design. I attempted to replicate what I saw in to my own designs coupled with the references that I found online. I needed to include key characteristics of "creepy" scenarios that I felt were right for this project which were monochrome color palettes, broken down decor(chipped and cracked walls) and furniture placed in a way that suggested as if someone or something still lived there.
Aside from the hallway-esque areas the players traversed through, we also wanted players to be able to go into some rooms, and explore for bits of story, hiding places and batteries to keep them going. With the time our team had left, certain decisions for the game had to be made and so only two of the 4 rooms planned made it into the final product. The rooms chosen were rooms that we all felt were the scariest to us growing up. For me it was the bathroom, only because I saw a commercial of the American remake of the Japanese horror flick "Ju-On: The Grudge". Specifically the scene with the a woman being attacked by the ghastly entity during her shower freaked me out for so many years and even sometimes to this day, was what helped me illustrate this room. The broken glass was an extra added touch from one of my friends based on a nightmare he had of a ghost reaching out from his bathroom mirror.
The bedroom on the other had was based on one of our peers childhood fears of a dark and shadowy figure watching her from her wardrobe every night. To reflect that, I made sure to make the wardrobe the biggest part of the room grabbing as much attention as possible and it unsettled her.
