Pawn

I drew many maps on paper to establish the layout of the castle's rooms. A few changes were made in the final version but the drawings helped me a lot to stay on track.

I sketched a few concept art pieces to better visualize certain rooms of the level design, as well as the general atmosphere of the game, many assets, characters and UI elements.
Certain elements and ideas illustrated to the left had to be cut out of the game during the production due to their complexity and lack of time.

Other sketches and plans were made on paper for the gameplay elements. For example, brainstorming of beats for the boss battle, a list of enemies, their attacks, movements and bonuses, as well as a quick drawing of the controller's buttons.

Because my 2D art skills were not very good at the beginning of the project, I attempted to create some game assets on Krita, without much success. I decided to take an online pixel art course, which allowed me to establish a stronger artistic style for the game and gave me an approachable method to create the assets.

I had initially planned to implement a character customization option, allowing the player to chose the colour of their pawn just like classic chess. Unfortunately, the idea had to be cut out due to the animation technique chosen. The main character was also supposed to wear a helmet as an armour, but I chose a shield for the same reasons.

Other challenges included the level of difficulty of enemies. They were sometimes too easy or to hard to kill. There were also a few bugs that didn't appear during the builds but that many testers experienced.

You can find a few scripts from the game on my Github, right here.
You can see the full page on my portfolio, here.