The 2024 Mental Health Game Dev Champions, hosted by the people at the Safe in Our World video game charity, is a game jam that prioritizes mental health in game development. This jam encourages it’s participants to be open about their experiences, and to create games based around their stories.
Joined by a team of five individuals, I serve as the 2D artist of the group. I role I served is to create designs for the characters and flesh them out as development progresses.
Unfortunately, the jam had to dropped due to reason’s beyond our team’s control. Whether the game will ever continue production is undecided. Below catalogs all the early concept and character art that I have put together for the project.
Lundie (Player Character)
Here is the early concept art for our player character, a Norwegian Lundehund known simply as Lundie. This project has been a learning experience in creating stylized animal designs, and paying close attention to what makes different breeds of dogs unique. Lundehund’s are a very unique breed of dog, so I made sure to capture that within my design.
The production leader was also looking for a simple and stylized look for the characters, reminiscent of styles such as the Paper Mario games.
Refined the design to look a little more like a Lundehund. The team (including myself) decided version one was the best of the eyes.
Fig (NPC)
Along the player’s journey they come across a snowy owl named Fig. Fig has a pretty standard snowy owl design, yet I still wanted him to have glasses to add a little extra personality.
Simple shapes are a big focus of these designs, as they are easier to draw and eventually animate.
Pet NPCs
Different pets the player interacts with. Each pet design reflects their personality, even if meant to be subversive.
Pictured below is the feisty pomeranian, Mino. Decided to draw up two designs, one more stylized and one more anatomically correct.
Another pet to be introduced was a friendly Samoyed by the name of Samson. He was meant to be Lundie’s first friend, and because of that, I made sure to prioritize round, friendly shapes.
Townsfolk NPCs
Townsfolk designs are meant to mirror their pets in some way. In the case with Mo (Mino’s owner), he still has Mino’s limited expressions, even if their designs are meant to be contrasts of each other.
When the team asked for a placeholder for a human NPC, we decided to go with Mo. I decided to update his design along the way to help over come some quirks I noticed in the original art.
