Byori Hwang - “The font’s curvy forms contains a sense of nostalgia and playfulness, so I added a 3D chisel effect and tweaked the letter E to reflect the time period and concept of the game.”
The Seven Sisters is a visual development of a game concept in collaboration with two designers: Byori Hwang and Jenny Xu.
For my portion, I focused on figuring out what is the story and illustrating the art.
Story
Cece, an aspiring astronomer, looks up to the sky one night and notices that a sister from the Pleiades Zone has gone missing from her cluster. Alarmed, Cece tries to rally experienced astronomers to do something, but they dismiss her concerns. Cece looks and looks and each night, a sister’s starry light disappears. By the time the last light goes out, chaos starts to grow around the world as travelers lose their way more and more without the guiding light of The Seven Sisters.
With determination, Cece takes a star boat and sets sail through the murky waters of space to find out what happened and bring the sisters back home. As she navigates the galactic ocean, she talks to other constellations and discovers there’s a bigger picture to the sisters’ disappearance.
Cecilia (but call her Cece!) has a goal of being the best at astronomy and make new discoveries. Her optimism clashes with the realities of the world but she won’t let that stop her from pursuing her dream of becoming a top-notch astronomer with her own star boat to sail the seas!
A starmite from a neighboring galaxy, Twinkie runs into Cece in the middle of her travels and decides to tag along. Twinkie may be the smallest starmite but they have boldness bigger than the sun.
The sisters plus Cece with Twinkie in pixel style.
We wanted to challenge ourselves creatively but keep it simple since we don’t have experience in game development. We came up with a couple of guidelines to our focus such as limiting our game to a mobile horizontal format and mostly in a pixel art style. We pulled inspiration from a variety of sources such as Greek mythology, historical astronomy and the animated movie Treasure Island to name a few.
Early character sketches
I’ve never done pixel art and it’s hard than I thought it would be! I’ve had to really think how to simplify the design but still read clearly.
I also wanted to improve my illustration so I thought I’d combine the two by imagining a cut scene where the characters look more detailed to bring out some of the whimsical elements.
Jenny Xu did an amazing job creating the UI graphics - it really adds to the art!
Jenny - “I loved experimenting with pixelated typography and UI elements inspired by space exploration and the mystical style of 18th century design.
