Hi everyone, again! I'm back with another study session, following my never-ending to-do list.
I don't know if you guys know, but I love Breath of Fire 4 (actually, I don't know if you've heard of it). Maybe some of you didn't experience it, but for me, the PS1 era was the PEAK of JRPGs. And man, what a peak it was! Even though it was the beginning of the 𝟛𝔻 𝔼ℝ𝔸 for consoles, there were games with beautiful pixel art, like Legend of Mana, Suikoden, and Breath of Fire itself.
This game specifically sparked a lot of new feelings in me back then. From its incredible animated opening to the story that, even without understanding much English at the time, completely captivated me. Seeing that beautiful game that starts in a sunny desert turn into a serious and bizarre adventure with heavy themes later on really changed how I viewed storytelling. But today I'm not here to talk about the game itself, but rather ITS ART, and wow! What beautiful art!
I really like the art that Capcom made around the 2000s, from Street Fighter to Breath of Fire to Megaman Legends (which deserves a post here someday). Seriously, take a look at these Concepts full of gestures and energy.
And this caught my attention in the entire art direction of Breath of Fire 4. I had already played the third one before it, so for me it was a huge change when that colorful and magical world suddenly transformed into a world with more earthy/pastel tones and at the same time contrasting and strange. The theme here somehow departs from the standard European medieval tone and takes on a very authorial air with a certain Korean/Turkish reference(?)... It's really hard to understand all the references of this art direction, and that's what makes it unique. It seems like everywhere you look you find something similar but at the same time unknown.
But let's get to the point. Initially my goal was simple: to make a character portrait in the style of the game to study the color palette. So I went to the great spriters-resource.com to get some references. And so, after choosing some images, this was the initial sketch: a warrior with a large, heavy armor (which was heavily inspired by the character Ershin). First I thought of doing it in the same size as the original portraits, which are 40x48px, but I got carried away and ended up making it a little bigger because I wanted to add more details.
After some sketchs, I quickly realized that I didn't just want to blatantly copy the style of a game I love, so I decided to give it a personal touch. I LOVE the skin color palette of this game; for me it's one of the best out there. So I decided to add two more strong colors to the ones I had already created based on the game's, since I wanted to do a certain kind of line art on the character. Staying within the standard number of colors of the original portraits wouldn't work, so from 5 shades of skin color I jumped to 7 (it doesn't seem like much, but for pixel art it is ʕ ´•̥̥̥ ᴥ•̥̥̥`ʔ )
And then it was just a matter of tidying everything up and finalizing the character. It took a while, but it was totally worth it. I even ended up testing a certain type of dialogue box to see how it turned out, which you can see for yourself. By the way, for this entire project I used incredible fonts from fontenddev.com Go check it out!
And phew, that's it, it was ready... but I really like this game so I couldn't help myself and thought: -Why not make a battle scene? (as if it were something easy and quick)
AND SO WE RETURNED TO THE PLANNING STAGE
With The Spriters Resource open again, I grabbed some more references (for some reason I couldn't find the battle sprites of the main characters anywhere, if anyone knows, give me a call). I also went to check the original screen size of the PS1 games, and ended up modifying it to be wider and make more sense with our current screens. And so began an arduous process of world creation.
Who would the enemies be? Why would this character fight? Would she have allies? What does she do special? And it was on some random early morning that I started to come up with some concepts, like an entire scenario where a people live in harmony with a certain type of creature, and use discarded horns from these creatures to create their armor that reflects damage, so of course an ally was born who was a scholar and an enemy who was clearly an undercover hunter at the behest of the rich.
Since I wanted this to somehow be set in the little world I'm creating, I tried to keep it to two points: -Retrofuturism
-Magic
So I had to think of a setting and characters that spoke to both, analog and raw technologies but with a touch of magic. And so a great desert was created that is filled with lightning storms thanks to its magical crystals in its sand, and the Kusha'as, creatures that live in this environment and reflect these rays with their horns and scales.
Clearly, what good would it be to have characters ready for battle without a battle scene? I could just leave a generic background... I COULD, and so I went to good old blockbench to create this scenario. After a few hours modeling something "simple" and banging my head to paint it, I ended up with this result.
And phew, all that was left was the HUD!
Incredibly, that was the easiest part for me. I had to make a portrait for the helper as well, but in the end, I thought everything came together really cool!
Man, this was a long "study", but I loved doing it. I always thought I would never be able to do something even remotely similar to this game that I played for so many years, and doing this study gave me immense happiness and showed me how, even slowly, I'm evolving. I hope to do more things like this in the future....you think it's over? WELL! Not quite, in the end I wanted to make a kind of National Geographic report of life, something that would probably be read on some tablet in this world, so I'm going to put this giant image down here last. That's it for today, I hope you enjoyed this study and this process, don't forget to drink water and play games that inspire you, see you later
ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ/
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