jibs first ARTLOG! 1/21/26

This is written on JAN 21st, 2026 .

Welcome to my first Artlog!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is where I document my process and why I make those decisions regarding anything visual, for e.g. art direction, concept sketches, asset creation, and more. The reason this is going to be in a different post from the Devlogs is so that the length of the Devlog doesn’t balloon with all the images, but more importantly so I could go into finer details about the process.

Key Points

• Feeling Goal: All the life and nostalgia of a tropical beach town combined together with the moody New England seaside, experienced through a child’s eyes.
• The player should feel like a small kid in a big world. The scale and layout of the objects and the proportions of the older characters should help players feel that way.
• Being able to see a lot of the nature, some scenes seeing the skyline or the sea
• When unsure, look to vacation sim games, film photography, and impressionism paintings for colors, as we want to emulate the feeling of warmth and being childlike with the lens of nostalgia.
• The art style should also be able to convey moody feelings and more serious tones as the narrative unfolds.

Color Palettes and the Incoming Storm

• Main Storm Reference: Ponyo (2008)
• Pre-Storm Color Palette:
• Day - summery, bright, warm, emphasis on green, blue & yellow
• Evening - everything casted in blue
• Night - everything cast in cobalt blue. Flash photography-inspired.
• Almost-Storm Color Palette: colors from pre-storm starting to mute, emphasis on blue
• Storm Color Palette: Deep tones and muted warm tones, emphasis on ocean blue

   

Art Style

Overview

• 2.5D - 3D world with 2D assets
• Background: Painted, detailed, textured
• Characters: Small, chibi proportion, fairly simple, minimal rendering

Characters, Items & Manmade Structures

• Scribbly pen outline with watercolor coloring
• Current brushes used in Procreate are Feltip Andrew for outline, Washy Andrew for color, and Procreate Gouache for blending.
• Why – We basically went with our intuition and preference for this specific choice, but also looking at how well the interactables assets would contrast with the background in a way that's both aesthetically pleasing and signals to the players that they can be interacted with.

Background & Environment Assets

• Hand-painted, Gouache/Watercolor, Digital
• Why – Same as above, we went with our intuition and preference for this specific choice as it contrasts well with the characters, as well as lending itself well to moody colors later as the storm progresses. We also took inspirations from backgrounds from Ghibli studios films and the game Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation (2021).
• In the process of exploring the background style, I also tried out gouache paint on paper, with the possibility of painting the backgrounds on paper and scanning them into the game VS just drawing digitally. The result is that we will go with the digital version, because
1. I was able to find a brush that is very similar to the real-life painting brush that I was using, so there’s not a stark difference in terms of visuals!
2. Digital assets will be easier for color manipulation and subtle changes for the different times of day in the game
3. I cannot find a way to take away the artifacts of the white paper left from the scan (and smoother hot-pressed paper are more expensive than the cold pressed one we are trying it with😩)
4. It will be easier to make modular background assets and textures digitally.

   

Device Design

Experiential goals:

• Designed for kids - rounded corner, colorful
• Implied futurism of the early 2000s - smooth material, metallic, glossy, matt, plasticky (toy-like)
• Implied drag and drop interaction and the use of a stylus
• Handheld and can be hold with 1 Hand, can be kept in pocket
• Horizontal-oriented
• 1-Screen
• Minimum amount of buttons
• Kids feel special using it – feel like they are for a specific purpose
• Recognizable size and silhouette, in which NPC kids can be seen interacting with it
• Capable of playing games on(?)

Current Design Process
I started by researching a little bit into the devices from the 1990s to mid 2000s, looking at pagers, Game Boy Advance, DS, Tamagotchi, and other one-off gadgets from brands like Sony, Bandai, NTT Docomo, etc. They were very interesting to see and I was able to pick out some parts for inspiration and our goals with the look of the device, as listed previously. 

Then, I drew shapes that I associated with or inspired by the design of devices from my research, adding little screens to those shapes, and came together with Caelan to decide on a handful to develop further!

Once we have that, I sketched those options with a bit more details, including where the stylus can be kept, the proportion of the screens, and possible buttons! Here’s our current design picks for further development and why:

• The Happy - Looks like a fun console that one could definitely play a game on. Cute shape, obviously designed with kids in mind.
• The Pager - Screen to device ratio makes a lot of sense as a screen-based device. Can be adjusted for grip, as well as change the orientation of buttons to aid with the one-hand use.
• The Wing - Cute option. Not as practical and might be more difficult to integrate, but does reflect the spirit of the weird one-off devices.