So in the wood biome, it's a mash-up of three different styles: there's the traditional ink painting you might be familiar with from Chinese landscape paintings. So we took a look at a bunch of different locations across Asia, at a bunch of different art styles and painting techniques people use, and I wanted to take the essence of those and use them in the art style of the game.
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Pixel art is just a medium we can depict whatever we want. "But when I came to work on this project, I told Sherveen I wanted to pull from real life. So you end up with styles that look very similar to each other. "It gets into this cycle of people referencing the same few games, like Earthbound or Pokemon or Final Fantasy. "One problem I have with pixel art games is they can feel very samey a lot of the time, because they all draw from the same references," she says. "It's been really fun tackling different body shapes and different types of people who have such different personalities." For Mosser's part on the environments, she's been making pixel art since she was young, but with Midautumn wanted to do something that both incorporated the themes and roots of the game while also looking very different from anything else that was out there. "What really struck me when I was sent the character bios was that Sherveen had said to focus more on body diversity," they add. It's been fun to design such a diverse and colorful cast, they say, and they're trying to be attentive and sensitive to portrayals to ensure that players can see themselves in the game, first and foremost, as human beings. They tell me about several characters who are diverse in their gender identities, including the game's non-binary protagonist Robin. “"There's a lot of Asian representation, but when it comes to different types of Asian people, or Vietnamese people like I am, I was like, 'Oh my God, I can see myself in this game.' It was representation for who I am, and I think that's really cool." Pham is clear that Asian representation isn't the only kind of representation important to the team, though. When I play games, once I get to the point where I feel a certain level of trust with a developer, that's really only when I can start to enjoy games where people like me are depicted." Pham tells me that it was this concept in Uduwana's pitch that drew them to work on the game in the first place, referencing the frustration many Asian Americans have with a lack of Asian representation in video games, and the view of their very separate and unique cultures as a monolith. We're doing our best to portray these characters, so hopefully people can kind of relax. "So we're trying really early to build up goodwill and trust. "It's difficult, when you're making games that cater to marginalized audiences, you have to account for the fact that lots of people who play these games have a certain level of wariness in how they're depicted," he says. "I have a weird mish-mash of different influences where I am almost incapable of telling a story that will read as authentic to any other Asian diaspora person if I were to write it," he says.
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"Gentrification was really interesting with that you have to keep working against it." Uduwana says he wanted to create something specifically about Asian diaspora in part because of his own background: He's Sri Lankan, but spent 13 years growing up in Vietnam, and also a portion of his life in Singapore. “"I thought that the roguelike structure would be really interesting to do a narrative about - something where combating it takes repeated, almost unending work," Jiang continues.