Category: Art

Hello blog friends! It’s been a while! Real life has been crazy, but we’ve been chugging along on the game! [EDIT: holy heck, this post has been sitting in drafts for like, a month! I completely forgot to post it, aaa] Last time I posted, I wrapped up on talking about the starter Phantoms in the game. Now it’s time to talk about where all of the Phantoms, NPCs, and the Player live–the different worlds and environments.

I’m going to let you in on a secret 👀: I don’t particularly like doing environment stuff. Yep, crazy. My drawing passions lie with character and creature design, not quite UI and backgrounds. However! I do really like learning about new things and drawing inspiration from places I’d never thought to look before. So, I spent a lot of time looking at architecture from all over the world and used my newfound love of houseplants to fuel my sketching! (I have… too many houseplants for someone who just got into the hobby a few months ago 😅)

The Forest 🌳

You’ve seen the forest a lot, and you’ve probably even seen the concept art I’ve done for it in Claire’s posts! But I’m going to touch on it briefly just because it was the first environment we figured out and the first one that the player will see upon entering the game.

The Desert 🌵

This is the hub world of the game! The second place the player will visit! There was some apprehension about the idea of a desert world in the game, since the deserts in many other games are pretty… barren. Monochromatic. But I think there’s a lot of room for color and beauty in a big sandy expanse too! My favorite biome in Minecraft is the painted desert, so it kinda influenced a lot of my colors choices here 😅

I’m pretty… wary of borrowing inspiration from cultures I don’t know personally, so I tried to be respectful about my approach. I won’t be using any specific buildings as a mold for ones in the game, and I’m making an effort to establish my own set of rules for patterns and color palette in this area. This isn’t just for aesthetics, but so that I don’t accidentally grab parts of the culture that hold significance that I’ve missed. By the way, if there’s ever any part of these blog posts or art that I’ve done for the game that you think isn’t culturally sensitive, please message me or comment! I want to include influences from various cultures within my art, and I do research on all of it, but I’ve only been deeply entrenched in the cultures I grew up in myself so I’m bound to miss certain nuances.

In Conclusion

Anyways! I have 2 more environments to share in a future blog post, so look forward to that! Until then, stay cool, make good choices, and… uhh… don’t do drugs ok bye!!

Heya! Sera here! Devblog time!

So! Today I’m going to be chatting about the Love starter and Fear starter! By the way, the order in which I talk about the starters is somewhat random and mostly just based on what I feel like writing about on any particular day 😅 Here we go!

Love Starter 💖

The Love starter! There were a lot of directions to go, but we kind of knew from the start that at least one of our starters was going to be based on a dolphin. One of our friends from college has always wanted a dolphin Pokemon, and has yet to be granted that wish, so this one’s for her!

I looked into some cryptids that were dolphin-like, and most of them were pretty boring to be honest. A lot of globsters (animal carcasses that wash up on beaches and are misidentified as monsters, extinct animals, etc), and just not a lot of particularly original creatures. Which is to be expected when looking up a monster based on what it probably is in real life! But I did find one that gave me at least a bit of a starting point for our design: the rhinoceros dolphin.

The rhinoceros dolphin supposedly was spotted in 1820 off the coast of the Sandwich Islands and New South Wales, and was described as a large dolphin (around 9 feet long), with a black and white splotchy patterned skin and two dorsal fins. The men who originally spotted this “species”, Jean Rene Constant Quoy (who was a zoologist and anatomist) and Joseph Paul Gaimard (a naturalist) claimed to have spotted a whole pod of them, about 9 in total. No known cetacean has two dorsal fins (they all either have one or none at all), and despite a few more sightings of dolphins with two dorsal fins over the years, the rhinoceros dolphin is thought to be an old classic–misidentification!

There are a few explanations for what Quoy and Gaimard saw that day: a dolphin with a remora stuck on its head, a dolphin exhibiting “somersault” behavior (lying on its side with a flipper and fluke out of the water), or a pod of inbred beaked whales with some genetic mutations among them. I personally believe that the most likely explanation is a pair of beaked whales that appeared as one creature because of perspective! Baby dolphins sticking closely to their mothers’ side is a commonly observed behavior, and could easily explain the strange placement of a second dorsal fin on the animal’s head!

Our dolphin Phantom takes a lot of inspiration from this cryptid! I incorporated the two dorsal fins, since those are the most obvious feature of the original rhinoceros dolphins, and converted the big black and white splotches into little heart shaped ones! I also took the liberty of giving our Love starter a more obvious reference to the cryptid’s name with a little rhino horn on its snout.

Fear Starter 😱

The Fear starter was the second Phantom to be finalized, after our little Joy friend (you can read about the Joy starter here)! I actually drew this Phantom up before we’d decided on what emotions we were going to use as types in the game, so its expressions originally weren’t entirely fearful 😅

My idea from the start had been based on another mythological creature: the Dullahan! The Dullahan is a mythological headless horseman (sometimes horsewoman!) from Ireland. They’re pretty dang spooky sounding! They carry a whip made from a human spine, has a hideous grin and rotting flesh, and typically carries their own head under their arm! They are also somewhat commonly portrayed with a ghostly flame coming from the stump where their head once sat 👻

Scary! But our little Fear friend isn’t quite so intimidating. However, they do take a few similarities from the Dullahan. For one, their head is, indeed, detached. Around the stump is a ring of ghostly purple flames (to be animated… soon 👀). It would have been easy to make a bat-like creature draw from vampire mythos, but I like to make things hard for myself 🙃

In Conclusion

Thanks for reading! These creatures and myths have been really fun to research! Congratulations for reading this far, and I hope you have an awesome day 😀

What’s up, everyone? Time has been chugging along over here, and it’s finally spring! I can now go on walks and still feel my face when I get home! 🌸

So! In this post I’m going to be talking about my personal favorite starter — Anger! If you’d like to read more about the general process and philosophy behind all of these starter designs, check out my last devblog post here! And without further ado…

Anger Starter 😠

Though I personally love this Phantom, during our initial tests with people, a lot of folks were put off by how scary-looking the original design was so I had to dial it back a little bit… 😅

Like most of the other Phantoms so far, we have to go through a few different iterations to get to where we are, but the original design vomit sheet was pretty diverse!

Reminder: a lot of the designs that weren’t chosen might show up later as Phantoms! Just not as starters 👍 And the “final” design that we chose is even still subject to change!

When thinking of anger as an emotion, most people link it with the element of 🔥 fire 🔥, and I wanted to curb that expectation of typings in The Phantom Keeper. Games like Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and other RPGs use a lot of elemental types but our game is meant to be different, using emotions instead! Not all of the Anger Phantoms will be fiery, not all of the Sadness Phantoms will be water-based, etc! And what better place to start than a starter!

The inspiration behind the Anger starter was pretty simple: the yeti, Abominable Snowman, or Meh-Teh! I was looking for a cryptid, monster, or animal that could look intimidating, but still be somewhat… fluffy? So here we are! Big ol arms, tiny little legs, big angry eyebrow/horns, and somewhat cartoonishly scary claws!

The Yeti is purported to live in the Himalayan mountain range, and is described somewhat similarly to Bigfoot / Sasquatch and other ape-like cryptids. There have been numerous reported sightings of Yetis, starting with pre-Buddhist Himalayan people supposedly worshipping this “wild man” who was depicted as an ape-like creature. These people also shared tales of the Yeti to warn people away from dangerous animals, and to stay close to the community (similar to countless other cultures!).

During the 20th century, more Westerners began climbing the Himalayas and describing huge footprints on the mountain (many of these were later thought to be bear tracks). Like most cryptids, a majority of the “evidence” of the Yeti’s existence comes from eye witness reports. However! There are a few pieces of physical evidence — almost all of which has been disproven 😬 A scalp found by Sir Edmund Hillary (the first man to scale Mt Everest!) in 1960 (later determined to be from a serow, an animal similar to a goat), some mysterious footprints (later determined to be bear tracks), and even a finger were reported to be proof of the Yeti! (The finger was later found to be human through DNA analysis, possibly from a monk’s corpse… yikes.) Various hair, teeth, and tissue samples thought to belong to Yetis have also been tested against the DNA of known species. Most of these have been found to be from animals such as cows, bears, horses, and dogs.

Ending Notes!

So yeah! I only went through one Phantom this time around, but I really like talking about cryptozoology soooo 😅

I hope you enjoyed reading, and if you have any questions or comments, please let me know either by commenting below ⬇️ or by hopping on the Pine Drake discord server! I promise I don’t bite, but I cannot say the same for our lil Anger starter (gottem, tied it back, nice)! Thanks for reading! 👋

How’s it goin’, gamers?! It’s Sera, back at it again with some fresh new concept art content! 🎉🎉🎉

In this blog post, I’m going to be writing about some of the starter Phantoms and what inspired their designs! You can read more about what exactly these starter Phantoms are in Claire’s previous post and maybe a bit more about individuals in the future, but here I’m going to be discussing specifically their appearances: what we were going for, and how we got there!

Phantom Design?🤔

For starters specifically, we pushed very hard for Phantoms to be cute, likeable, and immediately recognizable. So! Things that tend to make creatures likeable and baby are using a lot of rounded shapes, biggish eyes, and by making them small! To make things immediately recognizable, we strove for unique silhouettes (dang, I almost spelled it right the first time), and differing colors from one another.

For future, non-starter Phantoms, we’ll also have more non-baby creatures, and I’ll get to flex a little more on some creepy/cool stuff 💪😈.

Joy Starter 😁

The first Phantom we revealed (and the first one with a finalized design)! Remember this promo image I did?

There they are! The design is simple, but we felt it would make a likeable and cute starter for people to bond with. Their design pretty much hasn’t changed from the original giant sheet of phantom concepts that I sketched up (maybe to be revealed in the future, it has a lot of possible spoilers).

That, and BIG GREMLIN ENERGY is always at the top of my priorities list. We added knees during the transition from the very first design to the final one specifically to maximize bastard energy 😈

Sadness Starter 😢

The sadness starter went through… a few iterations before we got to a final design. And even now, colors might change! Who knows 🤷

Axolotls make excellent laboratory subjects due to their regenerative abilities, and are widespread in the pet trade due to how easily they breed in captivity! They are also only native to Lake Xochmilco and Lake Chalco in Mexico, and are currently on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s threatened species list 😔. Unfortunately, conservation efforts are somewhat difficult, due to pollution of their natural environments and the introduction of predatory fish which feed on young axolotls.

Ending Notes!

So yeah! Sorry to end on that somewhat somber note 😟 There are still 5 other starters to go through, and most of those have a little more ~folklore~ than these ones did! I hope you enjoyed this regardless, and thank you very much for reading! 👋

Sera OUT