I love the character art in this mockup, as well as the concept! I'm guilty of focusing on major deities in media, so it was cool to read about your "divine doorkeepers" focus. The cover art is also super neat. Would love to see the small WIP sketches you mentioned at some point!
Viewing post in WITH DIVINE PROTECTION! Doorway Deities Simulator jam comments
Thank you for such kind words, Jaylus! I have a soft spot for the literal nobodies and unimportant background characters in a story. To be honest, I only discovered them by chance through lore research and it's somehow mind-blowing to me that there are so many more deities we rarely hear of.
Thank you again for hosting the jam. It's been a very fascinating experience for me. I never do game mockup art and this turned out to be more challenging than I thought. I usually start with the code and figure out the look and actual game by trial and error (depending on the type of game, sometimes I also write an informal design document first) and art tends to be last in pipeline to replace the placeholders. I design the visuals around the limitations of my own skills to what extend I can implement within a game engine.
I wanted to draw action screenshots that look as if they are straight out of a game, but I spent too much time tweaking the outfits and didn't reserve enough time to think about the main content and GUI elements. When I had to pick what I want to finish before submission date, I went for a dedicated itch cover because for playable jam submissions I'd never been able to make one that is not composed of reused assets. At least the character designs are definitive and will serve as reference for hypothetical future in-game models, which again will be simplified a bit. I'm going for the miniature house fairy vibes as shown on the cover - tiny gods in the metaphorical and literal sense - and the non-chibi proportions are how they looked in the past. I don't know when I'll update the page with more content and it's probably not soon, but I hope to come back to this project someday.