Another Shift was a horror-cooking-visual-novel game in development from Sorrisinho Produções, a brazilian studio that I worked closely with for the duration of the production while it was being funded through a cultural incentive grant made by the state of Paraíba. I worked in collaboration with another designer and my task was to follow his direction on the art production while I was their consultant on pixel art, as that was the style they choose for the project.

The overall concept of the game was this lovecraftian inspired story where a simple man from the metropolis, runs to the folcloric countryside to escape from loansharks, and starts working on the abandomend tapiocaria that he inherited from he's late uncle that died due to unknow madness, to be able to pay these loans. The whole concept lies on a recipe book that is counscious and convinces the protagonist to cook cursed food that drives the locals into the worst possible version of themselves, while granting the cook, more hability and agility in the cuisine, but also fortune and fame. In the perspective of the simple man, the point of the game is to see if the player is willing to corrupt the locals and change the narrative of the game in exchange of perks.

My work was to convert the illustrations made by Arthur into pixel art, but we were facing a lot of indecisions on how to approach the camera. Would we go with a full top-down view like Hotline Miami where the player would see the food from above? Or should we go with a third view perspective where we could see both NPCS, the player and the food?

Due to the eery nature of the game, our reference lied in movies like Amarelo Manga (2002) and Estomago (2007), which had a good representations of cheap bars open in the end of the night, slowly decent of madness and themes of violence. Our objective was to hide these themes from the player and present the game as a wholesome cooking game, like Galaxy Burguer and Coffee Talk.

Another indecision that we were having was trying to actually render every pixel on 1:1 proportion, insteand of scaling things up, so I had to cut the assets in different sections to be able to work with them, which ended being a near impossible task due to the tight deadline of two months, but at the same time, I produced pieces that are still some of my favorite to look at to this day, like this counter:

And this cooktop:

A lot of care was taken into make the game seems cozy right upfront.That's why the chosen food was also the Tapioca, a warmth brazilian taco-like made with cassava and filled with different ingredients. In my state, we usually fill them with cheese and ham or otherwise, with chocolate and banana. In the image below, we have: Ham; cheese with lettuce and tomato, just cheese and finally my favorite: ham with cheese and oregano on top.

In the midst of the camera confusion, we decided to go into a distortive shift of the perspective. The counter would be seen from a top-down angle, but the guests and the scenery would be seen from a first person view. We also decided to go with a know resolution for pixel art games, like 640x360 (which is the resolution of most images on this website) and scale up and down with a zoom in and out funciton. After that decision, everything would become quite clear and the production start finally taking shape.

After that, everything went smooth. Arthur would design the characters in his style, the poses, the background, and I would try to replicate his watercolored style on pixel art, with a more compact palette, focusing on the height of the lines and being able to distinct necessary details from minimal ones. The characters could react with dialogue with an array of expressions, angry, confused, relived, happy or neutral, which is displayed on the image below.

The game is in hiatus at the moment, as the devs are awating again for the public grant to continue the development of the project. While that happens, all there is left are the graphics presented above.