Hello everyone,

I’m Raswan Orizka, the Art Director, and I'm with Yan, the Lead Artist from GameChanger Studio. In today’s DevLog, we will highlight our visual development process for 1998: The Toll Keeper Story: discussing a fictional world that is also very close to our real-life counterpart.

In our previous games, we were more focused on visual elements with dark fantasy themes, where we took elements like creatures and magic from outside our reality. In this project, we've done a visual approach to take people closer to the daily lives of the real world, taking their anxieties, nostalgia, and symbolism to make it feel like an almost forgotten memory.

Initially, our visual idea for the story and gameplay was much simpler. We aimed for a more cartoonish, easy-to-digest art style with just a hint of eeriness that complemented a gameplay-focused experience. We drew strong inspiration from games like My Child Lebensborn, which has a uniquely simple yet dark visual style. To make the art style reflect the game's time period, we were careful with our colors and textures. We incorporated a halftone dot pattern, a sepia color overlay reminiscent of old, faded magazines, and a subtle yellow tint that resembles aged photographs and films.

After a bit of consideration, we felt some part of the early art style was too cartoonish for the game's themes, so we did a visual overhaul to reflect the tone and themes of the game better. We went through numerous iterations of character and cutscene art styles, reworking many assets and even redesigning some characters entirely, like making the style a bit realistic.

Some visual experiments we did involved making illustrations that are metaphors and satires, as a criticism of the world’s social and political condition. We turned them into a medium for the people of Janapa to express their aspirations. These visuals also help to visualize various scenarios that are happening, like conflicts between characters and the place they’re living in. We’re also using scrapbooks filled with diaries, newspaper clippings, and Polaroid photos to express valuable memories of the characters, especially the main character Dewi, who is putting her story inside her diary book.

We’re also highlighting the element of hatchings in all of our designs to give the impression of a rough and dishevelled vibe. This helps contrast visually the story of the struggling and anxious common people in the middle of an economic crisis and the tension between Janapan citizens and their government.

Some of the challenges we aimed for were to make the game as true to its time period as possible for both the characters and cutscenes, ensuring everything is authentic. We conducted research and cross-checking, paying close attention to historical details and adding nostalgic objects that would resonate with people who lived through that time period. For the cutscenes, there was an extra layer of difficulty in conveying a dark and tense atmosphere. We tried to show that each character’s emotions and gestures shine through by playing with camera angles and mainly the lighting intensity to make the event in the cutscene more dramatic.

Another highlight of the visual overhaul is that Dewi's hairstyle is directly inspired from the 'dead mom' anime meme, which really is our biggest foreshadowing that things are not going to end well for her.

Regarding relatability: At first, her design was extremely plain to make her more relatable to the everyday struggles of a pregnant woman without the means to support her baby, always tired and too busy to care for herself. We made her look somewhat disheveled. Eventually, we changed this to make her more polished and conventionally pretty when she’s pregnant.

And that’s how we visualized the final art style for 1998: The Toll Keeper Story. There are some parts of the process we really enjoyed when we developed the visuals.

Yan’s favourite part was getting the idea of the game from our Game Director, Riris Marpaung, and translating that into visuals on paper for the first few concept arts of the game. It was an interesting and new experience to explore various art styles and concepts from the ground up. Other than that, she really enjoyed drawing some promotional arts and being free to explore characters like Heru and Sinta through illustration!

As for Raswan, He really did enjoy making concepts for some parts of the end-of-day cutscenes and the final ending cutscene, where the heavy emotional feelings of the story need to be conveyed visually. For example, sketching the expression & gesture of Heru and Dewi having a debate with the background of cracked glass to convey the beginning of a shattering family because of differing priorities between a husband and a wife, and also the fragile struggle to build a family.

That wraps up our journey into visualizing the world of 1998: The Toll Keeper Story. We poured a lot of thought and heart into every line, texture, and shadow to bring this "forgotten memory" to life. Thank you so much for reading this devlog.