326

https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/my-neighbour-vampire

​More than 46,000 people in 114 countries got together to make games this weekend. I was one of them. 
Over the past 9 years I have joined up with teams and filled all different rolls. I have made 3D models, painted textures, drawn concepts, and programmed game features. I think this is the first time I only focused on one task. This year I drew and painted portraits. 
The game we made is a visual novel style jokey adventure story. It required a lot of writing and a number of characters. My job was drawing images of the weird cast of characters in the script.
I decided to attempt a cartoony line art and flat color style. This is not the way that I usually work and a very different style that I'm not very comfortable with, but that is the joy of the Global Game Jam for me. The time pressure is  high (you only have 48 hours), but the stakes are very low (failing is part of the process), so you might as well try something new. You don't really have time to overthink it. 
I started out by heavily overthinking it, which meant the first character I made isn't very good. The second character is literally a palette swap of the first, but that is a joke in the script. After I got that out of my system and just started drawing oddballs everything went much smoother. 
All in all, it was a fun, relatively stress free weekend, and I added a few new tools to my arsenal. 
Here are the characters I made, but I think they work better with the dialog, so you should probably download the game and play through it a couple of times. It's fairly short, but it includes some randomization and a lot of branching paths to follow. 
Thank you to the team that built My Neighbour the Vampire. Sean Brown, Stephen Ma, Evan Kawa, Alex Bymoen, and Sarah Cline.