Art Bible
The art style we will be going for is cartoony pixel art. Characters will have wacky expressions and movement, and environments will look stylized, colorful and whimsical. While the concept art is not pixel yet, it helps define the aesthetic of the art style that will later be translated into pixel art.
Concept Art
Pixel Art
Concept Art
Pixel Art
Concept Art
Pixel Art
Concept Art
Pixel Art
Concept Art
Pixel Art
Concept Art
Pixel Art
Pixel Art
Pixel Art
Pixel Art
Most characters will have 2 levels of detail:
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World: Smaller sprite with a full set of movement animation.
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Combat: More detailed sprite of the characters in a battle position with a set of attack animations.
The camera view of Toy Box will be the well known RPG camera, which is similar to the Top-Down view, but tilted so that sprites look like their being seen from the side instead of from the top.
TBD
The Town: The environment of the first world will be a rustic village in the woods built around a big circus, inhabited by puppets, dolls and stuffed animals living in perpetual midnidght. At first, it all looks quite welcoming and whimsical, but once inside the circus, things start to feel off. The more the players start exploring and looking into how the circus works, they find the basement.
The Basement: A gloomy, narrow and filthy area full of machines and mechanisms that control the upper layer. It is inhabited by the same toys doing rather unglamorous jobs, with the addition of unusual hand puppets managers that seem to be hiding something. The protagonists will advance through this area overrun with junk and machinery, trying to figure out where all the pipes, pulleys and wires are leading to, because the basement is clearly not the only underground level of this world.
The Crypt: After the basement, they reach the crypt. This area is composed of dark and cold interconnected catacombs, where all of the upper mechanisms lead. Despite it seeming completely empty, there are some unsettling individuals living in here: The cultists. What makes these robe-wearing blank-staring puppets creepier and more dangerous is that they have way more freedom to move than any other toy in this world. Whereas the others could barely move their tied up limbs, or only operate with their mouths or limp arms, the cultists are fully articulate. But the eeriest part is the pyramidal religion based around control and brainwashing they believe in. They join together near an altar, praying to some deity they call "The Puppet Master", while they pull the strings that control everything above them. But despite our heroes being able to defeat these freaks, there is still one floor left.
The Pantheon: A gargantuan, overwheling and dimly lit nave full of towering pillars with six-fingered hands on top, all with strings tied to the fingers that converge in a single idol at the end of the pantheon. A single, human-size statue with a hand instead of a head and no arms, with every single string present in the world coming out of its arm holes. This ominous shrine has a lighting mechanism that the players will need to figure out if they want the slimmest chance to exit this increasingly uncanny region, but little do they know that the entity the Cultists told them about is watching them and will not let them leave.
Concept Art
TBD
For characters, the average size for world sprites will be 16x32px, and for portraits it will be 32x32px.
The art style is influenced by modern cartoons like Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and Regular Show. For concepts, there's also been inspiration from Deltarune and Undertale, Toy Story, Jim Henson's Muppets, The Lego Movie and The Sopranos.