Day 2 - Making a game in ren'py - Aesthetic, a Main Menu, Also, Keeping on track.

I didn't really mention my intended aesthetic for my game yesterday. I want to have an 8-bit glitchy feel, but only in parts. I'll be purposefully mixing between cleaner and more digitally damaged artwork. This has the added benefit of me being able to hide my bad drawings somewhat!

Here is my initial concept for the main menu:

Image 1

I've just noticed that the game title is illegible. But as it's just a working title I'll work with it or something similar for now.

To edit the main menu itself you need to get into the code a little bit, but there are loads of useful posts on the lemmasoft forums http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/ to help if you're new to this. I'll be using a mix of the official documentation, forums and trial and error. For the art I've used a photograph of a sketch I drew and lots of editing in Photoshop Elements (which is pretty good for a light and cheap version). My current favourite thing to play with in Photoshop is layer styles, especially Hue! It really helps getting a saturated day glow look which I'll definitely be utilising a lot.

To keep on track with this project I've added in timeslots on Google Calendar with little notes like:

Install RenPy and create project (yesterday)
and
Quick menu screen mock up (today)

By breaking the project up into these tiny tasks I hope that I will stay on track and not get daunted by the scale of all the asset creation, development and testing!