The cemetery

Hi there, friends and foes of democracy,

This devlog is about the cemetery, a scenario I just finished drawing. What do you think of it?

 While completely absent from the prototype, the cemetery will be very important in the final game, being the background for several important scenes:

• Funeral of Leocadio. The game begins with the Funeral of Leonidas’ father, Leocadio, which is attended by many important characters of the story. One of them, Charon, the city’s most important sophist, will use the opportunity to recruit Leonidas as a new student.
• Yearly visits. Every year, Leonidas and his sister, Artemis, will visit the tomb of their father. In the first such year, they may bring a stella with celebratory inscriptions.
• Assassination attempt. When oligarchs plan to kill Leónidas, their first attempt will occur at the cemetery, as it is an isolated place where Leonidas predictably goes to every year on the same date.
• Game ends. Some game ending scenes will involve the cemetery.

Objectives of the scenario

• Beautiful, rich in details. As the player will come back several times, I wanted to make this scenario a pleasant place to be.
• Large but detailed. In the cemetery scenes, the camera will start very far and then come close to the characters. Thus, the cemetery need to be large but also detailed.
• Greekness. I wanted the cemetery to be clearly Greek. I think I may be failing in this objective so far, but at least I got the Sphinx in there.
• Old. The cemetery looks old, because the city is old. Indeed, the cript that appears higher in the mountain is an indication that the cemetery and the city date back to the Mycenean times.
• Compatible with the city map. I am also failing partially on this objective right now, as the mountains do not look right, given how the mountains are when we look at the entire city.

On making the Cemetery

About a month ago, I was feeling great with my art. I had just made the Library scene in about 20 hours in 8 days. I thought: NOTHING CAN STOP ME NOW.

But pride is a sin, they say.

Believing in my skills, I set my sight on making the cemetery scene, knowing well it is among the hardest in my game. I got an outline from Midjourney (see below for reference) and began to make my own version of it. After just 10 hours of work, the big picture seemed to be going in the right direction.

However, when I made a zoom, I noticed incongruences with the thickness and level of detail between the scenario and its characters. It took me some time to realize that, in order to have both panoramic and zoomed in views, I needed to increase my image 4 times. and redraw every line in it.

One adjustment led to the next. I had to redraw every line of the image with thinner lines. With thinner lines, I needed to correct all the coloring. I also had to add more details to the rocks to give an idea of their texture. Finally, I made a series of improvements: added blue tints to distant parts of the mountain, added grass textures in front of the rocks, and created a 3d horizon effect in the sky and the mountains. 

With this changes, the zoom in view looks a lot better:

All in all, this scenario took me 50-60 hours spread on 35 days. I still need to correct 11 scenarios made by other artists and create about 25 new ones. I don't have 2100 hours of work available, so I definitely need to cut some corners or design smaller scenarios in order to make this work. 

What do you guys think? Is the result worth the effort?

Midjourney basis

I decided that, whenever I use AI to help the process, I will show you what image it was. So here it is, in this case. How similar is it to my final image? Does this count as cheating?