Gestalt Illusion Devlog #1: Art Style

The protagonist looking out into the distance.

For our first passion project game, we are creating a completely free 2D Metroidvania-style game called Gestalt Illusion. The player awakens in a ruined palace filled with lost souls and shadowy monsters. You explore, make friends and fight your way with combat mechanic similar to Mega Man. There is a lot of work to be done but we have been thinking of ways to cut corners while still preserving quality and gameplay. This may take years to complete but we both have sworn to finish this until it is complete and fully playable.

There will be a unique mechanic to this game that we have not thought of yet, some possibilities are having an upgrade mechanic that is similar to rogue-like games.

We are two brothers that will be working on this. The older brother works on the art and coding while the little brother works on everything related to the audio. We both are attending university so progress will be slow but we aim to post updates once in every 2-3 weeks.

Art

Since there is only one person working on the art, we have decided to work smart by having the whole game to take place in one palace. This saves energy and time since variations in stages within one building is relatively similar and there are more chances for us to reuse some previously drawn objects like lamps, chairs and tables. You can see in the image below that the wall textures for the left and right stages are exactly the same with only their colors being different.

A mockup showing the intersection of two different stages.

The player character is heavily influenced by Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight game characters, the facial feature is the same but we have a taller and more slender body proportion. The game native resolution is 320 x 180 px and each tiles are 16 x 16 px. After studying other side-scrolling games we have decided to have the player to be around 2.5 tile tall. The following are the early concept design of the player, we wanted her to be wearing a school uniform similar to what Alessa Gillespie from silent hill 1 is wearing:

The concept designs of the protagonist.

In the end we decided on using this design. This design is good because it makes the character to be always the center of attention no matter where the player is standing by having a high contrast between her bright white hair and her dark outfit.

 The protagonist final design.

The character pose is also carefully designed to make sure that the silhouette reads very well and easily distinguishable from far away. This avoids player losing sight of the player:

The protagonist silhouette.

Summary

We have completed the design of the main protagonist and the first two stages, we are considering of using the indoor looking stage with the bed to be a reoccurring save room that the player can find scattered around the palace. The player probably have to interact with the bed to sleep and save their progress but it is still in consideration. 

Future Plan

We are going to work on the first stage music and also the save room music if we ever decide to have one. We are going to also work on the protagonist animations.