It’s been awhile but here we are. I am a junior at UC Berkeley now, so my studies have been pretty hectic to get to this point, but that never culled my interest in working on my games. Between Shadowdawn: Memory of Fractalis and Shadowdawn: Genesis there has been a lot of progress and refinement in the themes and scope of the games. Now I’d like to start sharing some of what’s been going on!
First, I’d like to note, after all this time, that the “Genesis” subtitle for this entry in the Shadowdawn series is not and never has been a marketing gimmick, or something that just sounded cool. I realize that since I started this project quite a few RPGs and other games have used the subtitle, but in every case it’s always been as a reference to the start of something: an origin story or first entry in the series. Without giving too much away: while there is an origin story in this game (hard to avoid that with a new IP), it’s not the main focus. Yet, the subtitle mainly serves to hint at one of the bigger aspects of the setting, that links across all the stories planned. Memory of Fractalis and Shadowdawn: Genesis are the titles that fully explore this concept, the pillar that many other tales build off of in some way. Other games/stories will tackle the ideas behind the other aspects of the setting, so hopefully that won’t be too far off in the future.
In any case, I’ve redesigned Arashi and Ket in an effort to motivate the last push to make my playable demo, so without further ado:
After the large promotional artwork I worked on at the start of the year, I realized that the colors I used for Arashi were actually much better than what I had been using for years before. With a bit more focus on her costume design (and bringing her uniform more in-line with her male counterparts Shion and Yoshitaka) and some slight adjustments to the hues, I think I’ve finally got to a point where I can say there’s not much more I can do. This is pretty much the perfect vision I’ve had of her since I started the project, including portraying her personality which is something I’ve never quite managed to do, and it only took me years to get to this point. My art needed a long time to get to the stage it needed to, but I’m glad it’s finally getting there.
Ket has been a vexing character for quite some time. Drawing animals is hard enough on its own, but I never could get a handle on how to give detail and personality to his face. I studied and sketched dozens of mountain lion faces until it fell closer into my natural drawing style and finally have a pretty happy medium in how I portray him. I could never remove him from the story so I just had to suck it up, but I think it’s finally paying off.
