Phantasmagoria '42

 Become a migrating butterfly flying through smog clouds as you migrate in the Spring of 1942. WWII is raging on, and you start to wonder... are you really a butterfly? Or is it all just phantasmagorical wonder...

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 My role in the development of Phantasmagoria '42 was purely that of an artist for the most part, though I did help conceptualize and flesh out a few design decisions.

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The Player Butterfly

 Phantasmagoria '42 has a few smaller things process-wise. For me, I've generally tended to struggle to animate living creatures for a long time, but had been getting better. As such, I wanted to use this game jam to get over that and do well with living creatures. I started with our player animation, a butterfly.

 For animating the butterfly, I knew if I was to stick to the 4 color pallete of the Gameboy, and have room to give the background detail too, my best bet was to only use 2 colors. I opted to make it darker so the backgrounds could be lighter. The enemies were going to be crows, so I used the lighter of the two colors for the wings as they were larger, so that the crows could be mostly darker and there would be a difference in color. For the animation, I simply exagerrated a wing flap and used secondary motion on the body following it for a more life-like feeling.

The Enemy Crows

 I then moved onto the crows. I opted to make them 4x the butterfly size as that would make them an easier target, something I felt would be nice considering the general difficulty we were aiming for as a team. It also just sorta made sense for a crow to be much larger than a butterfly. Animating the crows took a good chunk of time given they needed more animations than anything else in the game (and a lead-in death animation that was cut). I used a lot of squash & stretch, secondary motion, and general exagerrated motion here as well.

The Backgrounds

 The backgrounds used lighter colors and I had to get detail in with two colors. I knew the backgrounds should be smog that was parallaxed in some way and was originally planning on making simple smog clouds that could be spawned and go left from the right. I felt that was too easy though, and opted to go with full-width parallaxed backgrounds that would randomize and be flipable for extra variety. I did two layers of parallax too to make it look extra cool and like the player is flying through a stream of smog.

 The top text bar was made darker and as such, the butterfly and crow are blocked off from being able to go up to that part of the screen (despite what the classic games this is inspired by allowed).