I was the lead pixel-artist and art director on Honeydew, Adieu (A unique thriller-parody take on cozy farm/social sims). My responsibilities while in this role were making sure the game had a clear visual direction as well as producing all of the in-game art assets. This post will be a breakdown of many different pieces of artwork seen in Honeydew, Adieu. Mostly environmental.
Tools Used: Krita (Concept work), Aseprite (Pixel-Art)
Extra Note: All in-engine screenshots are shared with permission from a beta build. UI elements, character art, and anything other than the elements focused on in this article are subject to change.
The Town Center
Arguably one of the most important areas in the game, the town center went through the most revisions and iterations. The player walks through the town center often, and it's the setting for two of the game's most important set-pieces.
The first step in creating the town center was determining the layout and general positioning of everything.
Shown below is the initial outline proposed. The area is a transitional one and only has one entrance, one exit. After some iteration and agreeing on the layout the next step was determining the look of each building.
Many references were collected when figuring out the general look and shape of the buildings. The Sheriff's office especially had a lot of iteration and I drew up a few different concepts for it, eventually as a team we settled on the last two buildings as potential candidates. Ultimately deciding on the two-story look with attached post office, though the other older looking building was later reused for a separate area in the game because it matched the more moody tone that the game was going for. The game is set in a small town with a mostly rural-american influence. So, there aren't many buildings. But what little buildings there are had to be distinct.
After the Sheriff's office was decided on the corner store was next. I wanted to play around with more angular buildings than commonly seen in Stardew-like games so this building had less iteration. While some things did change the general idea of a slanted corner and bay windows stayed throughout development. The largest hurdle for the shop was deciding on the color scheme.
After figuring out the shape of each building in Krita I moved to Aseprite to create the assets properly. First by creating the outline and basic grayscale colors. I made sure they fit within the given area - following this, I shaded each building, making sure there was a consistent light source in the scene, and also colored each one appropriately. (Shown Below)
After creating the buildings and setting the scene in Aseprite the environment was put into the engine to test it in-game, making sure positioning was accurate and that everything fit together as intended. (Below is an early implementation from the later stages of Beta)
The Fishing Bridge
This is another important location in the game as it's the first 'task' the player is assigned to do. The goal for this location was to lean into the farm-sim fishing tropes with a more generic looking bridge that still had character to it.
Unlike the buildings this one was started in Aseprite. It did not have sketches made for it, both to save on time given the strict deadlines of the project but also because the location was simpler. The bridge had to roughly fit into a [80 x 144] pixel grid. This was how the location was scaled in-game. There was some allowance for deviations though as long as the structure kept to this scale (Things like extra props or objects hanging over slightly weren't an issue, like the life buoy).
The bridge followed the same stages as the town center buildings (Outline/Grayscale, Shading, detailing, and Color)
As shown above, the mockup player sprite was also used to show a reference of scale for the bridge to prevent it feeling awkwardly big. As with the town center, this was also tested in-engine to make sure it fit properly into the environment.
