Art of Degrowth, Video Games: Coding and Narrative project, Spring 2024
Here is a compilation of art I made for one of two three-person game projects in the Spring 2024 semester of college, Degrowth! It's a 2D platformer where you play as The Druid, using a vine grapple to navigate an increasingly hostile environment as you make your way towards the over industrialized city.
You can download or play the game in browser here: https://nicholaslobaugh.itch.io/degrowth
I was the sole visual artist for the game, designing all custom assets (not including 3rd party environment tilesets). An inspiration for the foliage associated with The Druid was Russian хохлома (khokhloma), drawing upon a bit of my own Russian heritage as I thought of ways to design the forces of nature in a warm and folk style in comparison to the cold metal of the city. Due to time constraints, the plant asset sketches used ended up being much more liberally inspired rather than actually faithful to the хохлома style. With more time, refining this style would be one of my priorities.
The game's development was overall very constrained, created by just three students with beginner-level game making skills during a particularly busy semester for most of us. Still, I am very proud of the work we all pulled off despite these constraints! It felt good to finally make art for game development and I learned a great many things in the process, such as making assets without the expectation that there will be time to make them better later and using actual proper sprite sheets from the beginning.
Mock cover art for our semester long game project, Degrowth.
Intro cutscene gif, comprised of 4 frames roughly put together in the last few days of the project.
Concept sketches for The Druid, the playable character in Degrowth.
Head design exploration sketches for the fox Druid concept.
Rough colors.
Compilation of pose sketches that were originally meant to be refined and expanded on, but due to time constraints had to be used in the game in place of an actual sprite sheet or animations.
Foliage assets sprite sheet.
Hazards sprite sheet.
Direction controls tutorial graphic.
Jump tutorial graphic.
Grapple tutorial graphic.
Saturated version of the original druid sketch that was used for the app icon and the alternate mock cover art.
Alternate mock cover art using the original Druid sketch.
:)
Game screenshot, directional and jump tutorials.
Game screenshot, jump and wall jump tutorials.
Game screenshot, vine grapple tutorial.
Game screenshot, platform drop tutorial and moving platform.
Game screenshot, moving buzz saw hazard.
Screenshot of part of the Degrowth Itch.io page, with in game screenshots, description, and credits shown.