Penguin Game Inquiry: First Year Game

Back in first semester of first year at UOIT, our group was known as Team Underdogs and only had half of the same members as it does now. In our first game (A Night in the House of Evil) we were required to make was a text-based game. This begs the question, why is art evolution in the title of this blog post if our game was text based? Well that’s because I poured my heart and soul into this game. I took the initiative of trying to do most of the coding right from the start and making the main gameplay system. Not only that but I poured a lot of effort into the designs of the characters both in terms of story and in terms of actual art design.

Looking back I am not satisfied anymore with either. The story got confusing even for myself so I am sure it was confusing for other people if they even got far into the game. We also featured our art in the game in some of the “cut scenes and introduction” of the game. I managed to find a way to get images and video to show up in our program so that I could explicitly use these pieces of art for those scenes. But looking back to the art too, it is not even close to representing what I would be able to do now.

I haven’t been drawing very long at all and I have never taken any art classes (aside from the mandatory one at UOIT), I just drew casually. The art I drew for our game “A Night in the House of Evil” was just me continuing to draw every now and then and learning more as time went on. It’s now pretty much a year and a half later and I can say for certain my art knowledge now is much better than it used to be. With this in mind, I remembered hearing a suggestion for our group to try and revamp our old games. This inspired me to look back at A.N.I.T.H.O.E, and I saw my art. I became quite displeased upon seeing it again, so I wanted to try and revamp it up to my standards now. I am not going to do all the art, just a few pieces at most (because there is a ton of art I drew and I don’t have time to do them all until exams are over).

So here is the result of revamping one of the old artworks in A Night in the House of Evil.