Asterism
Full Moon
Dev Blog #19
27 November 2023
Album artwork collaborations
When I was in the initial conception stage of Asterism (almost two years ago now!), I realised that I was planning for a fairly long-term project that was going to be primarily solo development. There's good and bad consequences to this. It's meant that I've had a lot of creative freedom to make something very personal, but on the other hand it's meant that I've struggled with creative block quite a lot, and have not always had someone to bounce ideas off. I tried to introduce opportunities into the project for collaboration, particularly in areas where I felt I could benefit from others' expertise. For example, I've had some ongoing consultation on production, music, and programming / design from a few fellow members of Biome Collective, which have all been fantastic ways for me to learn from others and talk through ideas. Additionally, I ran a couple of playtesting sessions during the early development of the game to see how people interacted with the game, and also to share ideas about its direction.
I also wanted to create collaborations that would be more artistic in nature to help inspire me with new ideas while I was working on the levels in Asterism, to prevent me from working completely in a void. The way I decided to do this was to commission an art piece from 12 different artists - one for each song on the album. These would then make up an album artwork booklet to go alongside the musical release of the album. I was very inspired by Muse's Origin of Symmetry album booklet, where several artists were given the title of the album as a prompt to create their artwork, which were then brought together inside the album's art/lyrics booklet.
Because I wanted to get some external perspectives on the individual tracks, the prompt I gave to each artist was the lyrics alongside a draft midi version of a specific song. I was still in the process of recording the songs at that point, so these versions consisted of digital instruments as placeholders for the final recorded vocals and instruments. Here's an example I posted in one of my previous blogs of the midi version of the song 'Contours':
I thought that by providing this early version of each song, rather than the final version, there would be an extra level of distance or differing perspective on the song when the artist listened to it, compared to the version in my head. Also, that additional distance definitely helped with the nerves of sending my music to other people and asking them to listen to what I'd written!
The artists I worked with were mostly people whose work I admired from the Bristol arts/music scene (where I lived a few years ago), and from my local digital arts community in Dundee. I also had the opportunity to work with a couple of people I'd not met before after seeing their work at events, which was a fantastic experience! I picked a song for each person that I felt would be interesting for them to work with, and that I thought could be exciting in their art style. After an initial conversation, I gave each artist a brief that I tried to keep as open as possible. I briefly described the game, how I would use the artwork and then some size/resolution specifications, and left the rest up for interpretation.
This process has been one of my favourite parts of the project so far. The work I received from each artist was incredible, and everyone had such great enthusiasm for the project. Initially, I had planned for the artwork to just be used in the album artwork booklet, but I soon decided that I wanted to feature it more prominently in the game itself. The artworks now act as the decoded signal that the player finds at the end of each level in the game - presenting them as the visual representation of the music itself.
With the individual game levels themselves, I've also taken a lot of inspiration from the artworks' themes and art styles. I often have the song's artwork open on my screen while I'm designing the level its based on. The whole process has made me want to incorporate more collaborative elements into my future game design process!
I'm super excited to share more details about the art itself and also the artist behind each of them. Over the next 6 months I'm going to be releasing some short videos to highlight each artist I worked with, including clips of the songs and previews / early sketches of the artworks. Then the final tracks and art will all be revealed on release of the game / album! I'll be posting about this on my social media - so please follow me there if you haven't already! Twitter
TikTok
Thanks for reading this moon's blog :)
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