Good evening my fellow Kindred,

It’s the 13th of September, so it’s a Dev Diary day! I’m as excited as you since I think this is an excellent time to discuss visuals in the game. My nick is Morgoth and I have worked as a professional 3D generalist for around 2 years now. Non-professionally it’s by far more. I’m in the project from the very beginning and I cover a role you may call Visual Lead. In reality, I work with every aspect that is visible in our game starting from UI elements and ending with 3D models, location design, vfxes, and shaders. I think that I’ll start with 2D graphics since it’s easiest to explain and take you through the journey of how the project started and why we decided to pursue the style we have in our game.

Let’s start at the beginning.

At the start, there was an idea. The idea was to create a comic book-style interactive novel. You might be surprised but at the time I wasn’t as versed in 3D graphics as I am now. I was just afraid that I wouldn’t be able to pull it through. The idea evolved over time and settled on a top-down camera in a full 3D environment. The only residue that is still used by the game are portraits which are inspired by comic books style. I decided to go to that course because comic books were quite a popular medium in the 80’s. Also, pop art lived through its renaissance at that time.

Portraits are a pretty important part of the dialogue UI and in-game codex (which will be available later on). After all, they represent the NPCs - and PC himself. I decided to use vibrant colors that represent important parts of the personality of a given NPC at first sight - so always treat it as a clue. You may even say that I’m creating psychological portraits through color meanings and the psychophysiology of vision. This means I communicate given quirks of character through visual representation. The easiest example is the red color. I bet that the first thing that comes to your mind is its link to the blood - but it’s more than that. Blood means life, but also love and passion. There are also negative meanings - like wrath and danger. To make things even more interesting there are also specific color combinations that can also have their own meanings - like using red and blue which stand in opposition to each other.

The NPC's portraits also emphasize the Vegas style with its vibrant neons and colorful nighttime look. I also try to use the effects that link those pieces with robust, energetic, and bold art trends and design patterns that were popular in the 80’s. Bear in mind though that sometimes they change from iteration to iteration as I develop our individual take on the style. The best example is the ex-FBI female agent portrait (not used in the game jam version of the game). If you are interested I can delve deeper into the process of creating such a portrait in one of the next diaries.

Also, you can see in the game jam version of the game that I use a lot of vibrant colors in the UI. You’ve only seen a part of it, but I inspired it heavily on synth and vaporwave stylistic which are often modern-day take on the 80’s culture. I decided that style seen through the prism of a modern-day person would be by far more appealing than straight-up 80’s which can be seen as cheesy and outdated since it was popular 40 years ago. Also, I must be aware that I have to balance out the amount of bright and saturated colors to make the UI readable for the player. Otherwise, it would be difficult to use it - which contradicts its function.

That’s why I decided to use a tight triad (which is another word for 3 color palette). It’s not confusing for the eyes and it's quite flashy at the same time allowing the UI to be usable. In this specific case, it's blue-violet-red. The triad I use is not your normal vapor or sythwave though. It has a noticeable redshift - and it’s not without a reason. We’re playing Vampire the Masquerade game after all, are we not?

That’s all for 2D graphics. Stay tuned for the next dev-diary and I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did. Maybe you even have some thoughts? Suggestions? Or maybe an idea I can add to our game style? Don’t be afraid to share them! I’ll always happily listen on our Discord server.

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