[DPTG] why does it look like That (Patreon)

...a continuation from yesterday's post, and the main original point which required the background.

Because of the state I was in when I contrived the concept of this game, I came up with a single, underlying design philosophy that has informed nearly all aspects of the game in its entirety. For a project like this, I happen to think it's a genius approach, and I hope you all will understand when I tell you about it just how meticulously crafted it is.

The design philosophy for this project is something like this:

eh, fuck it, who cares.

That certainly became relevant when I was deciding the visual direction for the game. I knew there would be a lot of Nightmares to make, not to mention Masks. The ideal thing to do probably would've been to take my tablet and get to work on some proper art. But I was neither ideal nor proper, and digital art is really not something I've practiced, so I wasn't ready to take that leap. I figured I could just sprite whatever I wanted... although that I was a lot of effort to commit to. 

So I just started doing whatever.

"Whatever" turned into a vague outline of a Nightmare with a few blending shades. I decided grey-scale was probably unnecessarily boring and by splashing the darker shades with strong color I could give each boss and area it's own color temper. Self-harm is red like your blood. Dysphoria is tan like the color you might be better off if your skin were. Anxiety is orange because nobody likes orange. So on and so forth.

Then I just smoothed it out a bit and voi to the la, we have a fairly distinct visual style for the nightmares-- not only the bosses, but I can do all the tiles like that, and even charsets if I wanted. It's quick and efficient, and best of all just a little disorienting because it's almost as hard to tell what something is when it's sketched out in sprited lines of varying values as it is to understand what the fuck your thoughts are even doing.

but hey. who cares, right?

Daytime events are a different story entirely too.... but we can get to those another time. There's a lot less graphical work to do there considering the player is barely ever going to even leave their room.
and frankly, same.