SPIRIT Devlog 9: Dabbling with background art, and general updates

Heya all, and welcome to another SPIRIT devlog! Today I want to just give some general updates and showcase some experimentation with various kinds of background art. As you know, I'm making a point-and-click game that takes place at a real university and in a real city, and so I've been able to simply go around wherever I want the game to take place and take photos to use as scene backgrounds. The thing is, though, I want to do somethin more with them since I think that simply using photos ingame would detract from immersion. Earlier I've been experimenting with photo filters, which I still might end up using, but lately I've asked ChatGPT to make me some pixel art renditions. 

Without further ado, let's look at some examples experimenting with various art styles:

Social Sciences library

Outside the Social Sciences buildings, night:

Fantoft Student City light rail stop, night:

At least the spelling is consistent :p

Skuteviken (Hanna's neighbourhood), fall:

So obviously, this technology isn't perfect. ChatGPT lets me tinker with prompts and whatnot, but it still makes some changes to each shot, it tends to carry over artifacts like noise from a night-time photo, and it obviously can get spelling wrong. Also, it can be tricky to make the art style consistent, which is obviously a hindrance when making a video game. Either way I'm planning to just use Midjourney when I can afford it again since it seems to be the best image generator around. Or maybe I'll just use some kind of pixelating filter. At the same time, though, I'm not sure if 'old-school' pixel art is fitting for a contemporary slice-of-life game depicting the lives of young adults in the 2020's. We'll see where it ends up going. If anyone has suggestions for art direction, feel free to drop a reply.

As for updates, I've now got a working game flow from main menu through opening sequence, content warning, save mode selection (free saving or ironwoman), a screen that lets you allocate skill points, and an intro video. The next step is implementing Pixel Crushers' dialogue system, and a good system for handling and transitioning between scenes.