Weird Week (prototype)
art director, animation director, character designer, animator
Weird Week is an as-yet unannounced narrative mobile game from Sirvo Studios, the mobile game developer behind the celebrated RPG game, Guildlings. While not a sequel, it is set in the Guildlings fantasy universe.
You play as Vance, a small-town goblin kid teetering on the cliff's edge of high school graduation. Your friends see you as a hidden gem, your teachers see you as kid-most-likely to slip through the cracks, and you see yourself as an aspiring counter-cultural street artist called The Mess...and, also, an actual mess.
Your is upended when he accidentally signs up to livestream his last week of school on a wizard-produced reality show called "Weird Week." If you can gain one million followers by the end of the week, you get one magical wish fulfilled! But be careful: while each decision you make has the potential to gain (or lose) you followers, the cost of internet fame has major real-world repercussions for your small-town relationships. Also, the very fabric of reality itself. No pressure.
Weird Week is an offbeat and optimistic take on the challenges of terminally online life, and the ways our online personas intersect with personal and collective traumas in our real life communities.
ART & ANIMATION DIRECTION
I've been lucky to head up the Art and Animation Direction of Weird Week since its earliest beginnings. As a fully 2D, visual novel style game, I decided to take a big departure from the original Guildlings and bring the art into a more contemporary space. The weird and wonky linework ("non-Euclidean," as it's been called by the team) mimics teenage awkwardness, while also creating lots of opportunities to play with perspective – and as you'll see below, opens up the treatment of screen space in cool ways.
One of the big visual challenges of the game was figuring out how to balance the need for 3D movement through "narrative space," while maintaining a fully 2D screen space with flat artwork. For example, below we have a scene where you have to choose who to sit with at lunch. Will it be your old friend Estrid, or your cool crush Marxi? How could we create a sense of first looking around and then moving through the cafeteria as you act out your choice?
To simplify a rather complex series of choices and events, I decided to flatten multiple perspectives and timelines into a single image, containing all your possible choices at once. First, you scan the cafeteria to see Estrid and Marxi seated at different tables. You start to approach Estrid, but she doesn't look like she wants to talk to you. So instead, you swing your attention over to Marxi. She waves, and your heart flutters! Finally you take a seat with Marxi at the cool kids' table.
All of these separate shots – from wide to medium to close, and even the movement between them – are laid out in a single flat image. Simple camera pans create a sense of movement and shifting perspective in space.
This approach takes advantage of the way 2D textures work in Unity, as large, square images upon which you can embed a number of sub-images. We took this to its extreme by embedding not just several elements or frames, but in fact entire scenes as a single texture image. In doing so, we exploited the awkwardly tall and narrow aspect ratio of the mobile screen to create a sense of expansive, complex, and evolving space in a relatively small image.
CHARACTER DESIGN
One of the most enjoyable aspects of art directing Weird Week has been coming up with a cast of weirdos to inhabit The Quaint – the small seaside fishing village that is Vance's hometown. It's inhabited by both humans and goblins, an ancient race of beings that used to guard the magical ruins that dot the landscape. But these days, goblins like Vance mostly kick back and enjoy the chill life (like everyone else in the Quaint).
Character explorations
Character explorations
Character explorations
Character explorations
DEVELOPMENT ART
