In the early days of Far Away Land, around 2012 or so, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with the world. I had loads of characters and ideas floating around but things were nebulous and I was finishing graduate school and super stressed. FAL was very much my catharsis in those days. It was a place I could go to escape and explore and there was no judgment and I had no expectations of myself.
This is an image from a sketch for a Poomkin settlement. I think a more refined version of this found its way into the original Tome of Awesome. At this point in the art process I was largely trying to figure out the style for FAL. In the early days I would draw everything in pencil, scan it, redraw it in vector using Inkscape, and then finally drop it into Photoshop for the finished coloring. The results were fine but I always felt limited simply due to time constraints. I didn’t want an outside artist and I didn’t want art that looked like art in other games at the time. I wanted something that stood out, something colorful, something that seemed playful and fun while hiding a world where everything was dangerous. I'm not a fast drawer so this process was incredibly slow. Of course, that all changed once I moved into digital but early on it was a crawl.
In a future post I’d like to talk about the proto-FAL game I made where I was figuring out the style of the game along with the type of mechanics I thought would fit best. I'm going to be posting some more early sketches as well as I thought it might be fun to see the evolution of the game.
What draws you into a game concerning art? What is it you gravitate toward?
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