INARI Release 4 Impact

For this release of INARI, I was primarily responsible for creating concept art in order to start progress on the level in our game where there is a parade. This was crucial given that there was a chance another environment artist would be joining our team and they needed something to work on.

Concept art for the parade if it took place in the midground

Concept art for if the parade took place in the background

Because we initially didn't have a clear idea of what we wanted from the parade segment in terms of gameplay, it was a bit difficult to get an idea of what the environment should look like. However, once I finished gathering reference images and began drawing, the parade level began to take shape. We decided that it could be interesting to have a few new enemy types that show up in the parade. We also decided that the parade would primarily rely on palanquins, which would be used as platforms for the player. Our current plan is to have a few enemies carrying the palanquins. Small ones will be interactable and possible to destroy while bigger palanquins are more akin to parade floats. If the player falls to the ground, they get trampled and must start from a checkpoint.

Palanquin concept art

Once these base concepts were figured out, I turned to ironing out the best ways we could give our parade an ominous, whimsical feel. I decided that a lot of this would depend on the lighting in the scene. These pieces of concept art were particularly inspired by Lane's wonderful work on the fire VFX. We have yet to settle on how we're going to execute the buildings' long shadows (or whether they'll wind up in the final game at all).

An iteration of the parade occuring in the background

An iteration of the parade occuring in the background

An iteration of the parade occuring in the background

An iteration of the parade occuring in the background

Lastly, I had the opportunity to create a couple new buildings for the rooftop segment of our game. These buildings are taller than the others and my hope was that they would create more depth in the game while also making life easier for our level designers, who had been scaling buildings up until now. I would like to make a few more tall buildings in the future if possible. I also turned a couple rooftops into tilesets to aid our level designers and make it so they didn't have to scale the roofs up as well.

A color variant of a tall building

A color variant of a second tall building

Over the next few weeks, I hope to polish a few small details in INARI and continue to make life easier for the level designers by creating sprites for entire segments of the background. I also intend to communicate with an alumni who agreed to help with environment art and hopefully begin work on sprites for the parade segment of the game.