This was sufficient, but not as grabbing as I wanted it to be. When I uploaded Karisvale to Itch.io, it received 160 downloads with no advertising. They were people who had seen the Karisvale art above amongst a sea of other games and decided to click on it. This is how I learned the importance of eye-catching art.

Before this mini-project, I had zero experience with using Photoshop. I also had no software or tools for creating my own digital art. I decided to reach out to my fellow USC Games students to find talent to help me produce the cover art.

I worked with Alicia John. She sent me her portfolio and while her previous work wasn’t quite to the standard that I was willing to compensate her for, I thought we could make this work. I had always found myself captivated by the cover art for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D (after all, I spent years staring at the poster of it on my bedroom wall).

Specifically, I was captivated by its effective way of showcasing the characters of the game while not being too overwhelming on the eyes, such as in the cover art for Shovel Knight. I expressed this to Alicia and the two of us established a project schedule. Within a week, she had sent me her first sketches:

I was very impressed with her work and knew I had found the right person. The top right was my favorite because of its symmetry and ‘circular’ design. I requested that Alicia incorporate the ‘curvature’ of the characters and a curved sky gradient together. She revised it further:

The resemblance to the Zelda cover art is already very apparent, and I was nerding out at this. We went back and forth editing Shaymus’s (the centered protagonist) facial expression and the background elements. The plan was to reduce his resemblance to Abraham Lincoln while making him appear determined rather than bored or confused. Next, we planned the color. I had requested that Alicia drew each character as an individual asset so they can be easily moved when adjusting the aspect ratio of the art. Also, houses sketched from their in-game art were added to fill out the background along with dead flowers which play an important role in the game. This was the final version with color:

I was very pleased with this result and no longer needed anything from Alicia that I couldn’t learn to do myself. However, I thought the above work was missing something that I couldn’t quite describe, so I took it upon myself to edit it in Photoshop. I began with basic enhancements (new logo, drop shadows, a graphic in the sky, reducing emphases on the 6 characters in the back, and more) and attempted to give the art a specific color rather than its current mix of green and blue. I tried with purple and green:

I asked my family which they preferred, and purple was chosen unanimously. I’m proud of how the sky matches the ‘curvature’ I was talking about earlier. The leaves in combination with the sky make the art feel alive. However, I couldn’t help but compare this work with the Zelda art, and I was disappointed with the difference. The Zelda art most likely had a team of professional artists to produce it, but I at least wanted to come close to recreating its level of professionalism. I was intrigued by how the Zelda art looks almost like an oil painting, with harsh shadows and a borderline cell shading between colors.

I spent a week of my summer watching Photoshop tutorials on filters and trying to achieve what I had pictured in my head. I combined different aspects from different tutorials because no one video on YouTube had an exact guide on what I wanted. I ended up having to edit every single character and layer individually to have a coherent effect. Below is the result, which I am so proud of that I actually ordered a custom poster of it online, which now hangs in my college dorm.

There are several things to unpack here. I doubled down on the purple and added multiple layers behind Shaymus to tint the characters and background. I’m very happy with making the color gradients in the characters’ faces appear as if they were drawn in, mimicking the oil paint effect I mentioned above. The houses in the background were darkened drastically to blend in with the grass and lake. I thought the edge between the houses and the grass gave off the look of clip-art in the version Alicia gave me, so this was important to me.

Feedback from my parents on the previous colored iterations revealed that they can’t help but associate the Lost Man (bearded at the top) with Jesus. Once they pointed that out, I couldn’t un-see it. I worked on his shading and his fade effect to add more mystery to his appearance (to match his role in-game) while no longer using the bright light behind him that gave my parents this impression.

Additionally, by having all of the Photoshop layers as individual assets, I was able to put them into a blank Unity scene and animate a splash screen in a matter of minutes. This can be viewed upon booting up Karisvale.

Karsivale’s logo is a road sign that makes an appearance in-game. I, therefore, needed the logo to match this. I have always liked how Marvel in particular makes their film logos look like physical objects, and I experimented with this. Below is the current and final logo next to a logo I made based on the logo for the movie, Black Panther:

I think it’s very clear why I went with the more simplistic road sign (I thought the logo on the right looked like a pendant that goes on a chain). However, I’m glad I experimented. After all, experimenting with the ideas that come to my head is a form of self-respect that I learned from this project: if I think it is worth investigating, then it’s worth my time to investigate. Countless creative ideas come to my head that I never act on out of fear of wasting my time or it not turning out the way I envisioned. With this art, I didn’t stop trying to improve it even when the original that Alicia gave me would have sufficed.

 The cover art has now plateaued in how good it can look, and I found any further changes to be either unnoticeable or detrimental to the current piece. I’m glad I found this stopping point because I know from experience that it’s challenging for artists to know when to quit. This is my most proud piece of digital art, and I have even come to like it more than the Zelda cover that inspired me to get this far.