You're listening to WITR 89.7 on the underground. Welcome everyone, I am Ar. I am here to do a fun little special with y'all. I have to do a blog post. Specifically, I got to do a blog post because I am on the development team for Hush, on the echoes VIP project, so this is my solution to not being able to type. If you are reading this, you're reading a transcript of this radio show available to the public, being broadcast live at the moment, but probably not when you're reading it. So if some of the grammar is funky, that would be why. So, hey guys! I'm going to talk a little bit about my experience on this project.
So I originally came on as both a 2D artist and a game design and developer. However, that second one, the latter fell through, it fell through for me, so I stuck to being a 2D artist for the end of this game cycle, I would say. Definitely towards the end, but still had a pretty good time, still had a pretty solid time overall. This was actually my very first time being like, a dedicated artist on a game dev team. So that was really exciting. It was kind of clear to me that I was maybe not the most aware of how to– of how to like get my assets in the game, if that makes sense? It’s-It was more of the– I had very few guidelines as to how I should do my job and what my team really expected for me, in that they expected that I would do good at it and give them assets, but not much beyond that. So I had to really go and decide for myself how I wanted aesthetically– how I wanted to frame my ideas for the game, how I wanted to contribute. And so for me specifically, I was not focused on in-game assets like characters– well, I did do one character. I did draw the father, and that was a bit of a trial and error asset there. But the other stuff, the more main things that I focused on were like UI based. So that was a lot of like, I made the text box art, I made some buttons, I made like that home screen, I like took an old rendered banner that we had and I repurposed it for our game. Stuff like that. I did a lot- I did some font work, so a lot of it was based in UI and typography, that sort of thing. And so if you notice in the game, a lot of the UI is actually thematic. And that's because that's the one thing that I am vaguely confident that I can do pretty well is that in games, I really like to see visual thematics throughout the game, so I like it when the UI ties into some aspect of the game's story or the game's like theme, like the deeper themes.
So for example, one of the things I did for Hush is, because Hush is the story about a young child going through the- experiencing the Cuban Missile Crisis through like a very childlike lens and doesn't have a clear understanding of what exactly is happening around them. A lot of what was told to me and was apparent throughout the game is that this child is very much a young child who is using the things around them to sort of piece together this story of what their parents aren't exactly telling them. And so the way they do this is through like small bits of newspaper they're drawing on and like they're doodling on notepads and they're playing little games of patty cake with their stuffed animal, their little bear. They're playing hide and seek with their parents, that sort of thing. So it's very, very childlike. It's very young and innocent and creative, especially with the drawing aspect of the game, the drawing game itself, so I wanted to like tie some of that into our user design. So my first idea that was a hit, I would say, is the home button for Hush.
When you first enter the game, there is that beautiful banner that I repurposed and you click this button that says “Hush” and it's framed as if a young child had scribbled using crayon on a bunch of pieces of paper and scribbled the word “Hush”. And that was my intent at a callback to the drawing game where you as the child will draw on like pieces of paper and newspaper that your father left around the house. So that was my first attempt, and that actually fit in really well with the game once it was put in. It like, it was really cohesive and I'm really proud of that, the same way I am with the text box. So in the game, the dialogue text box is based off of like lined paper from a children's notebook because this kid is around six or seven years old, I believe. So this would be around the age that they're like practicing how to write. They're getting better at it. A lot of, you know, school supplies. are present in these themes because I feel like that was a really good tie-in to dialogue as well as like a child's kind of bad handwriting and kind of bad doodles and drawing. So for the text box, my first iteration had more like squished together, I would say, like lines. This was a product of the fact that I completely forgot what textbook, like text paper looked like, like notebook paper. I completely forgot because it just wasn't the first thing on my mind. It's a-- it's, if you're an artist, you'll understand the “the second you put your fingers to the page, you forget what a bird looks like”, type deal. So when I threw that into my, my group's channel to get feedback, I did get some really good feedback that was to more closely mirror the style of a, specifically a child's notebook-- paper, which would have more spaced out lines, bigger margins, because, you know, they're practicing still, so they're really getting the hang of it, they need more space for their writing. I did go in and I used that feedback, I changed it, and that's the final text box asset in the game, and I'm, again, really happy with that. It looks fantastic, and I think it does tie in together with the background as well, with all of the warm colors and the deep browns. So I think that was a really well-made decision.
And I think the same thing I did with the fonts is I tried to keep them sort of whimsical and childlike with the characters speaking. I tried to match the personalities a little bit. So the parents, I found a different font for the parents as I did for the child, and I think for the parents, I went for more of like a typewriter-y feel because of all the newspaper they leave behind to give it a little bit more serious weight. But when the child is speaking, they get a more rudimentary font that's more, uneven. It's a bit scratchy. It's not the most like, elegant looking, but that's okay because it's just– it's just a kid's handwriting. So I think a lot of these put together kind of make the game feel more like you're looking through the eyes of a child. I did, the last one, I totally forgot to mention this, but during, in the Patty Cake game, the play button is actually a small post-it note that says play on it. And the original button was like, just a normal pink button that said play, but I was like, wouldn't it be fun if this small kid is leaving post-it notes around? With, you know, reminding them to play with their imaginary friend, Brobin the bear. So that translated into a post-it note being the play button with like, again, some kind of childlike font to keep it more-- to keep it more whimsical, as I like to say. I like describing it as whimsical, childlike, innocent, whatever it is. So that was my general process of designing the assets throughout my time on Hush.
I did obviously run into some problems, especially with trying to design the father character. I didn't have a great idea of what the team wanted for that design, so I iterated through a bunch of them. And I will-- this is where I will admit my failings as bad at Discord, because we did use Discord as our main source of communication, and I am famously not the most active on Discord, but I did make it a point to try and weekly pick a day to submit my work for feedback and criticism. And I think I stuck to it pretty solidly and I did get so much great feedback, so I think honestly for my first run of being a dedicated artist on a game dev team, I had a really great time. I– even though it didn't pan out for me to also be GDD, which was something I was looking forward to, I'm not upset that I stuck with 2D art. That is something I was interested in doing when I, you know, stepped into this game. When I stepped into this team, I was aware that I would be doing at least some art. But I am proud of what I accomplished, I would say. And I had a fantastic time, so I really do hope that everyone who plays Hush enjoys it. And, you know, play some patty cake! Thank you.