The Domovoi: Miscellany

The Domovoi, a Twine game by Kevin Snow, has been released. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting my art and sketches from the game. If you haven't checked it out yet, please go take a look -- it's free and short!

Just one last post on The Domovoi, I promise. Here are the various odds and ends that didn't fit in anywhere else, but thought might be interesting enough to show.

Opening Screen

 

The opening screen is one of the favorite things about The Domovoi. Not only do I think the end result turned out great, but the process of creating it was a testament to the strength of our collaboration. It was a cascade of good ideas that solved a specific design challenge and improved the final game.

In the original build, Kevin presented the title illustration and folktale epigraph on a single page before leading into the story proper. The folktale was intended to introduce the concept of the domovoi to an audience that might be unfamiliar with Slavic legends. The illustration, of course, was meant to show the domovoi and lead directly into the main narrative.

The problem, though, was that a lot of playtesters became confused about the relationship between the epigraph and the main story -- some thought that the latter was a continuation of the former. Kevin played around with the text to make the transition clearer, even to the point of considering a change to the storyline's opening line ("I have a tale for you friend..."). Neither of us were really happy with that idea.

I thought about it for a bit and suggested separating the epigraph entirely from the title and beginning of the main storyline -- present each on its own page, just like the opening of a book. I could even put a few simple graphical elements (I was originally thinking of little drawings of some of the household objects) on the epigraph page.

Kevin loved the idea immediately and had a fantastic suggestion of his own -- the epigraph illustration should be an animated candle flame, and it should change color after the story has looped back to the beginning (to indicate change and hopefully entice the player to try another round). We both knew that we had just hit on something really cool.

Candles

 

I don't have any animation training, so making these was a fun little challenge. Kevin pointed me to Zac Gorman's great comic work as a reference for the type of low-frame, high-impact animation he had in mind.

Anyway, these are all of the candles I ended up making. Personally I think the early screw-ups are kind of funny, but they helped Kevin and me narrow things down to the type of style that we wanted. Even as we got close to a final, though, we ran into a couple of nitpicky little pixel issues that had to be squashed lest the epigraph look like a Geocities page. (Edit: Which, ironically, is kind of what it looks like in the preview that Blogger generated up above. Oh well!)

The alternate candle was originally supposed to be blue, but the purple end of the spectrum worked a little bit better. I was listening to a lot of Castlevania music at the time, which somehow helped.

Logo

 Actually, I don't have too much to say about the logo. Kevin asked for a typeface that resembled Soviet constructivist fonts, and as it happens, I was reading Gene Wolfe's The Land Across at the time. I thought the cover font was perfect and tried to adapt it for The Domovoi.

I have very little experience with logo design or creation, but luckily the style made it a bit easier for me (I ended up making everything out of rectangle shapes in Photoshop). I tried a few variations with weathering effects applied to the letters, but Kevin and I both preferred the simplicity of the original.

Unused Title Screen

When Kevin and I were first discussing the title illustrations, I had an idea for an Ivan Bilibin-esque partial borders around each of the images. I gave the idea a test run on the candle illustration, but we never ended up using it.

Although the border version looks alright on its own, unfortunately it didn't look quite as good against the black background of the webpage. The borders looked like they were floating off in space, entirely disconnected from the scene they were enclosing. Still, it's at least worth posting.

Thanks

I just wanted to mention again how great it was to work with Kevin on this project, and also how happy we are that so many people enjoyed the final game. Hopefully these posts have been an interesting look at how the artwork for the game was created. Thanks for reading!