Hello!

This time I would like to write about the design decisions that have been made since the last devlog.

The game is reaching a finished state. I would even say that the project has reached a point where it is in an MVP state. I could release the game today and it would technically be finished and working. But I’m still not happy with doing that yet. That said, I hope the game can be released in a month or two.

Grid Angel design and concept art

Since last time, progress has been made on the graphical aspects of the game. It is funny how the titular character, Grid Angel, has not had the concept treatment until now. I think there are a few reasons for that. The main one is that the size of the sprite that the player sees Grid Angel in is only 16 x 16 pixels. The avatar for Grid Angel for the dialogue boxes is also very small. Oracle's and Ronin's on the other hand both have screen-sized portraits of themselves. That requires a higher level of detail to look good. So what happened during the game jam, was Grid Angel's assets were drawn on the fly and wholly by feeling and spontaneous inspirations that flew by my head at the time.

Left: Side sprite of Grid Angel. Right: Avatar of Grid Angel for dialogues.

Now it is Grin Angel's time to shine! Grid Angel, or Angel for short,  is an entity that is a manifestation living in cyberspace. Angel serves as a protector of both cyberspace users and other entities that live and operate there. The three main characters (Grid Angel, Oracle, and Ronin) started as just names before they had a backstory or character design. Just like when someone establishes their digital avatar when representing themselves online. What name will they go by? The names of these characters represent their role in the world and the story. 

The name Grid Angel was a very nice-sounding name for the character. It represents his role in the story, is authentic to the types of hacker names from back in the day of the early internet, and allows for cool-looking gothic and Christian iconography. At the start of the game jam, I took inspiration from TV series like Kamen Rider, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Grid Man. The latter example is about a hero in cyberspace who fights huge monsters among cyber buildings with outside help from the real world. Similar yes but I loved the name so much that I used it for this game's protagonist.

An early sketch of Grid Angel was made shortly after the sprite was made.

The general themes for the design are of course the 80's and 90s era cyberpunk and armored body with angelic details. The head of Angel to me is the part where this shows the most. From the start, I wanted to include something that looked like the early VR headsets that are so often depicted as a way to enter cyberspace. I wanted them to be the boxy and bulky kind, but that didn't work out because of how unbalanced it made the head look. So the headgear became a more formfitting one that still retained the sharp-edged look.

The headgear also became the point where I included the angelic winged feature. In the sketch below you can see how I experimented with the wings form and just how they were attacked to the headgear. 

Sketches of Grid Angel's head and headgear.

The angelic theme can be even more prominent for the character. Below you can see a concept piece that shows a Neon Genesis Evangelion-inspired version of Grid Angel drawn by Ebba Larsson who is currently also making art of Oracle and Ronin. This version includes many more pairs of wings and they are less natural feathery and more digital and holographic. The number of wing pairs also has significance in a biblical sense where the higher order of angels have more wings. The seraphim has 3 pairs of wings. Excluding the helmet of Grid Angel, this indicates that that is the order he belongs to. Perhaps in a larger story, this could be incorporated where Grid Angel gains more power in cyberspace and thus also more abilities. 

A concept of Grid Angel by Ebba Larsson. This shows a more angelic-focused design.

One more thing...

I want to thank everyone who has read this far! I am so excited about the project and I spend a lot of time thinking and working on it. I hope to be able to finish the project soon. Originally I wanted to be done with this project this month. But I have some other things in life happening right now that take my daytime. So I am now aiming for next month instead. Hopefully, it will work.

Cheers!

Admiral Alex