Ever since we started work on Unearthed, Ben has been most excited about the opportunity to push his artistic abilities well beyond what he has achieved on the Game Boy up to this point. If you have played Opossum Country, Decline or The Machine, you would probably agree that Ben's artistic talent really stands out from the crowd. As well as Game Boy games, he has also published a sizable science fiction biopunk graphic novel named Heliosphere which sports a good amount of body horror and dystopian ideas that would make David Cronenberg sweat.

So when he agreed to work with me on Unearthed as the artist, I was ecstatic, knowing full well that the final product would be of the highest caliber! In this devlog, I'll take you through some of his work process and give you a little taste of what to expect in the final game.

When it comes to background art, after the story is pinned down and a script containing the visuals and what dialogue will be placed within the scene is written, Ben's first step is to create a sketch of the background art. This allows him to settle on the overall composition of the image, make changes quickly and efficiently as well as start blocking in tonal definition. Once Ben is more or less happy with the composition, the next step is to finalize the pixel art using the 4 tones of the DMG Game Boy and export that image as a PNG for use in GBStudio. Finally, palettes are created and adjusted to suit the aesthetic and painted over the scene in GBS.

In the case of scenes with large amounts of sprites or animation, the same principles apply, but this time, the metasprites are also created to suit the limitations of any one scene.

In GBS 3+, actors can be larger than 16x16 pixels, but with 2beta5, we are limited to 10 actors per single screen, all of which must be 16x16 pixels large at maximum. This limitation means Ben must get particularly innovative with how he uses actors and sprites.

While working during the jam, Ben was rushing to complete the cutscenes under a significant time pressure. Thankfully this pressure has been removed post jam, so Ben has been able to revisit much of the artwork and spend even more time improving it, adding details and fine tuning each image to maximize its effect. 

The artwork in the full version is really quite extraordinary. We are both very much looking forward to sharing it with you all when the game finally releases!

In the next and final Devlog, I'll conclude this series on the development of Unearthed.

Happy Gaming!

Tom (Gumpy Function)