No Art Skills? No Problem!

Cyclops (V.O): Previously, on Sexy X-Men Dating Sim. I talked about how we wrote and structured the first episode of The Phenomenals. You can play The Phenomenals for free on the Dorian app, available on both iPhone and Android.

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What would the X-Men be without their ultra high tech mansion compound? It’s hard to imagine an elite fighting force of superheroes working out of a cubicle farm or the local rec center. The X-Mansion in Westchester provides a Danger Room for the heroes to train, a Cerebro room for finding new mutants and entertaining guests at cocktail hour, and a bedroom for Wolverine to deface photos of Cyclops. There are, like, hundreds of shredded Cyclops photos under Logan’s bed. It’s weird!

Locations are very important in visual novels. Without them, the player is speaking to a sprite in a blank void. Unless your game takes place in white out conditions or a Matrix world reboot situation, a visual novel with blank backgrounds will feel distinctly unfinished.

As I’ve discussed in prior newsletters, for The Phenomenals pilot, we wanted to keep the budget down. Unfortunately, neither of us are artists ourselves, and we didn’t have the budget to hire an artist to make a fair number of backgrounds. Action adventures tend to move through locations briskly. I looked through asset packs, but I wasn’t finding what I was looking for. Dorian offers its creators a library of background assets to use, but our settings were specific and off the beaten path for dating sims. If we were making a game about vampires in a gothic castle, or a Japanese high school, we’d have a wealth of backgrounds to choose from. Supersonic jet interiors? Military command centers? Even run-of-the-mill locations, like a big box store? Not so much. (I guess the “love at a Walmart” fantasy isn’t wildly popular among VN players.)

One thing I did notice is that some of Dorian’s backgrounds appeared to be photos run through a portrait filter on Photoshop. Straight photos would look jarring against hand drawn sprites (though I’ve long had an idea for a Roger Rabbit inspired visual novel), but I wondered if I could use altered photos somehow…

I decided to research X-Men ’97 screenshots for inspiration. I noticed something. While many of the backgrounds looked like traditional animation, some of them looked (deceptively, probably) simple, like line art and washes of color. Maybe I could create something along those lines – pun not initially intended, but left in.

So I ran an experiment. First, I figured out the size of Dorian backgrounds and setup a canvas in Affinity Photo. The Affinity Suite is like the Adobe Suite, but you only pay for it once and it’s, like, $100. Best software purchase I’ve made in years. I grabbed an early mock-up of one of our character sprites and placed it center screen, emulating how our game’s layout would look.

Next, I found a royalty free photo of a jet interior on FreePik.

Then I imported the jet image into my template, centered and sized it, and ran it through a filter called “Detect Edges,” which makes the lines in the photo “pop.” (You can tell I’m not an artist, because I use terms like “pop” to describe how images look.)

After that, I inverted the image, so our characters wouldn’t live in The Negative Void.

I used “Levels” to try and get rid of some of the noise. The lines and marks I figured an artist would never draw. I also made the image black & white to kill the distracting bits of color.

Finally, I added a wash of color. A blue to signify the space was cool and safe, with a lighter blue for the windows to suggest sky.

Put it all together…

Is this as good as the X-Men 97 backgrounds I was inspired by? Ha ha, absolutely YES. Better actually!!! Okay, okay, no, clearly not. Even the simplest X-Men 97 backgrounds have depth and shading. Our backgrounds are very flat and they still look like photographs. If this was a final, finished game, I wouldn’t want to ship with these. I would want to scrape together an art budget for backgrounds and give an artist proper time to draw nice ones.

But we weren’t trying to make a final, finished game. Our goal was to make a Dorian pilot quickly and inexpensively, knowing that these episodes would be improved later. This pilot is designed to evolve. Here’s what I do like about the backgrounds, though. They sell the story. They give the player a sense of space and mood, and they have a unique style to them, which we hoped would make them stand out on Dorian. And they were cheap and relatively easy to make. (Sourcing the photos was still a challenge.) For a game jam timeline and a tight budget, Amanda and I were happy with the results.

🎲 Your Turn: Have you stretched beyond your comfort zone to finish a project? Have you stretched your resources thin to get to the finish line? Reply to the email or hit the orange button below to tell the world.

📨 Next Week: Deadlines are stressful, but they’re also valuable. Next week, I’ll discuss the vices and virtues of structure on a creative project.