Artstyle of my visual novel “The Great Voyage”

Maybe a week before I decided to start working on my old project again, someone on twitter shared screenshots from an old japanese PC-98 game.

(Though apparently from a porn game of all places) The screens inspired me. These games were made with a very limited tech and there were strict limits in ex. how many colors you could use, and how big the images could be. You can see these limitations in the art, but it’s STILL SO DETAILED! I love it so much.

To make my VN somewhat unique from the majority in the market and create consistency withing the art, (and also to save my time in drawing) I decided to imitate this artstyle myself.

To achieve this I’m using 8 main colors to do all the backgrounds and pixelart. As there are no hardware limitations today, I’m not so strict with resolution and If the situation needs it, I’ll use whatever colors necessary on the character art.

Speaking of character art. Not a single asset is ready but some are next in my list. However I’m still a bit torn what style to use on the characters. The story of the VN is set in a fantasy world, which resembles our world’s 1700’s or Rococo.
There’s a great manga that is set in Rococo called “Rose of Versailles”. It has beautiful artsyle typical of 1970’s manga:

I was thinking of imitating that artsyle as many people recognize it and connect it with 1700’s, however I’m not so sure this artstyle is compatible with pixels, as the style is very “curvy” and uses either very little details in some areas (hair) or too many in others. (eyes)

Another option is to just use the style PC-98 games use.

Or maybe a mix between the two.

There isn’t any animation in VN sprites and the characters personality has to show from the sprite itself, so I was thinking of adding personality to the characters by posing them in exaggerated poses like in Jojo:

I don’t want people to feel I lifted the poses straight from Jojo so I would have to put some unique spin to it.

Anyway, those were my rambles about the artstyle. Next I’ll be actually working on one of the main characters so until next time and have a nice day :D

Total Lines: 1502
Ready Lines: 119
Progress: 7.9%

-Hanna