Over the past week, I started submitting BYTE to publishers! I only sent pitches out to four publishers, but have received feedback from one of them, though I will save that for my presentation next week.

The other major things that have started happening in BYTE land are new attempts at revising the character portraits, which I’ve been talking about seriously for about five months and more generally for about ten months. My big issue with the character portraits is just that they didn’t feel nearly distinct enough for BYTE, which otherwise has a very distinct art style crafted around the game. On the other hand, the portraits just felt like more generic visual novel portraits and didn’t feel like they gave much character to either the characters or the game.

I am currently approaching the character portraits from two different angles:

I. 3D Models as Portraits

This idea has a few key benefits; firstly, I don’t need to worry about the character portraits anymore, which rely on my not-good 2D art skills. Secondly, a 3D approach makes it much easier to animate the character portraits and make the dialogue much more dynamic.

Unfortunately, though, my character models don’t look very good when pushed up close to the camera for this long. These models have many, many issues that don’t matter much when far away, especially when put through the dithering, but up close are much more apparent (just look at Jonathan’s collar in the third picture). Continuing with this style would likely require pretty significant revisions to my models as well as creating a much more intricate animation system. It’s also worth noting that I can animate the characters in the scene already, so I don’t think that animating the character portraits is as important.

II. Medieval Saint Portraits

These portraits I am becoming much more interested in. I had the idea a while ago to make the portraits look like medieval linocut saint portraits, but never had the time to fully explore it. The Arthur portrait uses the classic saint portrait style of depicting a saint in the manner in which they died (often beheaded, holding their head), and since Arthur will eventually be beheaded I thought this could be a fun kind of foreshadowing for his character. Jonathan, on the other hand, is doing the Jesus hand symbol that spells out Jesus’ name in Greek partially to signify that he’s a good Christian boy and partially because I thought it was funny.

I really like where this style is headed, but am admittedly not confident that it will feel at home with the rest of the art style either. I think it’s a step in the right direction, but I’m just not positive yet.

For the next week I’ll probably keep experimenting with the portrait styles to see if I can find any breakthroughs that will guide me to the right place.