Many designers love sketching. Taking the pencil and putting things on paper is the first step in their creative process, everything begins to evolve from this point. In a way, it’s like an extrovert who thinks out loud, but instead of using words, the designer uses a pencil.

On the other hand, there are designers who follow a more introverted process. Before grabbing a pencil, they need to first visualize the picture in their minds. I am one of these.

The visual development begins in my head, and I only proceed to portray the ideas when I know what to do and how to do it. Therefore, the format chosen will depend on the context. Sometimes, I would grab a pencil and draw a quick sketch of the concept. Other times, I would rather move forward and jump to a higher definition of that concept, straight away.

This is exactly the case.

Concept art for prototyping.

I have been mentally working on these concepts since I chose The Campsite as the main theme for this game. Sometimes, inspiration comes in the middle of the night without notice. Whenever it comes along, the sketchbook in my head is ready to capture those ideas.

The agenda is tight, and last week’s plan was to start creating the assets required to build the first prototype of the game. As I already had several ideas, creating the concept art for the game was quite straight forward, so now I have enough art to create most of the assets I need to build the prototype.

It’s also find important to mention that the room concepts I’ve created -as the one shown above- are meant to illustrate the mood of each scenario, and they are an approximate representation of the different elements that might appear in the game. They are pixelated compositions created using stock artwork and images, so nothing of my own pixel art has been created yet for the rooms.

📋 This week: Time has come to put all things together to build the first playable prototype of the game. During this process, I will continue creating assets as I need them (e.g. basic character animations), but I have enough material to build a walkable version of the prototype which I hope to finish this week. The idea is to have something build as soon as possible, so I can start testing the puzzles and the overall feeling of the game.

You can comment about this post on Discord 💬