Artstyle of “The Great Voyage”

(Note: this is an older blog post I made about my game. To garner some more attention to the release I will be posting these posts as devlogs every week until the game releases. In the devlogs I will be detailing different aspects of the production.)

Maybe a week before I decided to start working on my old project again, someone on twitter shared screenshots from an old japanese PC-98 game. (Though apparently from a porn game of all places) The screens inspired me. These games were made with a very limited tech and there were strict limits in ex. how many colors you could use, and how big the images could be. You can see these limitations in the art, but it’s STILL SO DETAILED! I love it so much.  To make my VN somewhat unique from the majority in the market and create consistency withing the art, (and also to save my time in drawing) I decided to imitate this artstyle myself. To achieve this I’m using 8 main colors to do all the backgrounds and pixelart. As there are no hardware limitations today, I’m not so strict with resolution and If the situation needs it, I’ll use whatever colors necessary on the character art.

Speaking of character art. Not a single asset is ready but some are next in my list. However I’m still a bit torn what style to use on the characters. The story of the VN is set in a fantasy world, which resembles our world’s 1700’s or Rococo. There’s a great manga that is set in Rococo called “Rose of Versailles”. It has beautiful artsyle typical of 1970’s manga: I was thinking of imitating that artsyle as many people recognize it and connect it with 1700’s, however I’m not so sure this artstyle is compatible with pixels, as the style is very “curvy” and uses either very little details in some areas (hair) or too many in others. (eyes) Another option is to just use the style PC-98 games use. Or maybe a mix between the two.