The Astral Project: Character Design
The Astral Project is an RPG scavenger-hunt experience, where the player is required to solve cheeky puzzles inside their house in order to travel to the Astral World and reach self-actualizing revelations. I was working on this project with three teammates: Jay, Kristjan, and Nneka. We each took on different roles throughout the process, based on our experiences and strong-points. With my experience in design and illustration, I took on the task creating and animating our game’s two characters: 1) The main character (i.e., the player / you), and 2) Leela the Astral cat companion.
As a team, we agreed on the general design aesthetic, color scheme, and overall theme we wanted to work with. Purple would be our dominant color, and the game would be designed in pixel art to mimic 8-bit video games. My teammate Nneka took on creating the environment and its elements, and I began drawing the characters.
It was my first time experimenting with pixel art, so it was a very iterative process. I start by watching some tutorials on how to draw pixel art on Procreate App, which is the software I regularly use for illustrating. I customized a 1 pixel grid on my canvas, and created a new custom made brush that allows me to draw pixel-by-pixel.
Main Character
Starting with the main character, my team and I agreed that it should be a gender-neutral person. I decided to dress the character in dark clothes, a hoodie and pants. Apart from gender neutrality, I believe the character’s outfit convey’s the game’s overall theme of being quarantined at home, and feeling alone and isolated. We all know how that feels!
After finalizing the design with my team, I moved on to creating the character’s walking animations: forward (towards the player), backwards (away from the player), left, and right. Since our game design engine of choice is Godot, my task was to create animations frame-by-frame so they can be imported to the program to mimic a walking sequence for the character. I’ve worked in animation before, and having the character drawn in pixel art facilitated the animation process due to minimal details required to redraw over and over. Each animation for each direction ended up consisting of four frames, as you can see in the images below:
Leela the Astral Cat
Moving on to Leela, my work was more challenging. I started by drawing the cat’s sitting position facing forward (shown in the picture below). Choosing to draw Leela in purple colors portrayed her Astral or Cosmic nature, especially that she only appears whenever the character enters the Astral world inside the game. Her traits are friendly and inviting, since she helps out the player throughout the game to solve multiple puzzles.
As for animating Leela, I think it’s safe to say it was the most challenging task! I studied cat-walking movement by observing my cats walk around the house, and inspired from other designers’ cat-walk frames. Similar to the main character, I created frames for Leela’s four walking directions. I also created a fade-in animation for when she appears for the player in each challenge. Leela’s walking animations still require some touch ups, but they look great overall. Unfortunately, we made a last-minute decision to keep Leela in a sitting position all throughout the game so we never got to use the walking frames for the final game design. Nevertheless, it was an exciting and experimental journey for me as an illustrator!
Final Thoughts
The entire journey of conceptualizing, designing, and implementing a digital game from scratch has been an amazing experience. My teammates were the best people to work on this project with, and our combined creativity paid off. Imagining that we had more time to work on this game, I believe we would have created something truly special. With the limited time we had, we weren’t able to implement our initial concept completely, but I am still very content and grateful to have had this experience and worked with a wonderful team.