Ladies, gentlemen, great and terrible wyrms that make their home amongst the volcanic ashes of Ehngyldr, welcome!
Tonight we're very excited to announce that we have new artwork rolling out on Steam, social media, etc.!
Our new banner art was drawn by Red Potion Studios, an indie art group based in Bogotá, Colombia. They've done absolutely incredible work and we collaborated with them for over a month to get the art just right; to really nail the aesthetic of Sunflowers and the Goddess of Death. And we couldn't be happier with how things turned out!
As a small team of two ourselves, who know well the arduous path that must be traveled in order to reach our audience and spread the word of what we're building, it was a priority for us to find another small team to work with in creating this art. That, along with their professionalism and the incredible portfolio of work they shared showing the work they've done with other indie developers, is what made us decide to collaborate with Red Potion Studios on this endeavor.
Read on to learn about everything that went into creating our new banners and icons for Sunflowers and the Goddess of Death, and we hope you will enjoy following along with the process. :)
And don't forget to Wishlist Sunflowers and the Goddess of Death on Steam! Every Wishlist helps spread the word about the game across the platform, enabling our tale to reach more and more fellow adventurers. :)
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The Journey
We started working with Red Potion Studios in mid-July, sharing character and environment artwork with them along with our ideas for what themes and notes to hit with the finished work. We wanted to build something that would really embody our vision for the world we were creating: a land of scattered ruins and mysterious forests, lorded over by a pantheon of apathetic and aloof gods. It was also important to us to focus on the characters our story follows, as Sunflowers and the Goddess of Death is at its core an old-school inspired JRPG; a quest undertaken by a small party of characters fighting to end the war that threatens to overtake their homeland.
After a couple weeks they sent us four different sketches and we chose the one we thought best highlighted Wedelia as the protagonist of our story, while still capturing the feel of a "party-based RPG through a world of ruins and forgotten gods."
At this point in the process we were still using a placeholder logo :).
After a couple more weeks of back and forth, we then arrived at a fully colorized art piece with a new logo that both looked fantastic and encapsulated a similar feel to the original logo (which was drawn by Paige at The Incandescent Bard). The darker hues and colors of the final work were chosen to better capture the somber nature of the storytelling in Sunflowers.
Not only do the characters look incredible, but we also love the background art. A dark and foggy forest flanking a mountain topped with crumbling ruins...
From there, Red Potion Studious created all of the formats we needed for Steam (which is quite a few; Steam actually requires 10+ different sizes/formats of banners, icons, and logos in order to populate all the different locations a game could appear).
Our new key art made into a vertical capsule format!
Each piece of the work is on a separate layer within the PSD file, so characters can be repositioned to build banners like above. Normally one has to crop sections of the finished work to create said banners, so we wanted to share something that showcases a little more of the top and bottom of the drawing (though not all of it; even this is still cropped!).
PS: We wanted to share the full 4K artwork, but it is too large of a file for a Steam Event, unfortunately.
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That's all we have to share this evening! We hope you enjoyed getting a bit of insight into the process of creating key art and banners for places like Steam!
As always, thank you so very much for joining us on our journey. We will continue to work our hardest to build a game everyone will love to just kick back and get immersed in.
Take care, and may the rainy winds of the late summer moons carry you gently forth to wherever your own journey next takes you.
-CW Hendricks