Mistmore

Student game at The Game Assembly (2019)
Download for free at itch.io

In this action-packed top down adventure you play as a detective searching for a missing scientist on a remote, mist-covered island.

Use your fighting and dashing skills to move deeper into the island, travel between different dimensions crawling with enemies, find hidden notes, talk to locked away villagers and see if you can survive long enough to untangle the mysteries of Mistmore Island.
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My contributions: Art direction, Mockup, Environment graphics, Music, Menus, Logotype, Website design.

Music

Since the story is about an evil force that uses electricity and electronics to manipulate people and the world around it, it just seemed perfect to make a dark ambient soundtrack with lots of synthesizers and sounds of static and interference.

I sampled different electronics and tried a lot of new techniques on the synthesizers I have and ended up with a result where I think the human aspect is almost completely gone on some of the tracks (which is what I was going for).

Intro and Outro is composed by Hannes Rehnström.

Tip! Play the soundtrack using the video below and leave the music running in the background while you look at the rest of this page.

Mockup & Art Direction

With only 6 weeks halftime (4 hours a day) to finish the project, the choice of art style was very important. Not only did it have to fit the mood and story, but also be fast and easy to work with.

A natural start was to go for cloudy weather to even out the contrasts and dull the colors. This would both set the mood in the way we wanted, as well as give us an art style with lots of flat colors that would make for a quick workflow (one base color and one shade of highlight and shadow at the most) and modules that were easy to combine (as long as the color is right, the transitions between assets would work out).

The game takes place in two locations, where one is the regular world we know with all the forces of nature, but the other one is more like a parallel dimension, with strange colors and an ever-present feeling of dread that will make your hair stand on end. This is The Great One's realm. 

In order to save more time, we decided to use the same assets for both locations and change the colors to make them feel different, and finally decorate the areas with a few unique props to make them stand out from each other.

I worked in Photoshop and was responsible for the environments and UI in the mockup. The characters were made by Kushtrim Brahimi.

Props

The top-down perspective and grid limitations from our level editor Tiled made us go for a very boxy design on most of the houses and machines that you interact with. This also served the story well, since the the vine-like cables that had infested the island looked so much more chaotic.

Most assets are made only in Photoshop. The lighthouse, TV and pill jar are 3D models made in Maya, with final touches in Photoshop.

Graphic Design

One of the challenges in this project was that the game had to be story driven. With only text boxes to tell the story, we needed to find a way to express the voices of the different characters. We decided to use different colored text boxes and sometimes change the font used, depending on character and situation.

I was responsible for making those font and color choices, as well as creating the game's menu design and logotype for the studio. Photoshop was used for the entire process.