The primary emotional cue of Maiden Pink is the relationship between mother and daughter. The game starts with the player being a little girl and traveling with her mother in a fantasy world. The mother is always protecting her child and won’t let the daughter away from her sight. However, the mother gets injured seriously at the end of the first level and can’t keep protecting the daughter through the journey, so the player as a little girl needs to be independent and learn skills and responsibility to save her mother.

We all experienced the time that always being protected by our parents and the moment we have to learn to face the difficulties in life on our own. Women especially experiencing tremendous growth in independence. As the leading emotional cue reflects the life experience, the aesthetic style also needs to be emphasized to evoke the childhood memory and nostalgia emotion. Nostalgia can appeal to the audience on a sentimental and emotive level. Retro style graphics then becomes a more appropriate approach to achieve our primary goal.

My own practice and experiments for our game Maiden Pink are trying different methods to create artworks in a retro style that bring the nostalgia-evoking stimuli.

All the artworks for Maiden Pink are created in very small resolution (25 X 25 pixels) to mock the style of old games. It’s also important to set the brush as pencil and the size to be 1px to draw in Photoshop.

However, when I move to creating animations, things become difficult. It requires a better understanding of the movements, as the fact that the canvas and pencil are very limited. I have to minimize the design and do more research on the internet and other similar games to see how other artists/designers handle this problem. 

So after some research, I decided to work with frame-by-frame animations. It is the early form of media in the film and animation industry. In traditional 2D animation, each frame is usually drawn by hand and placed in a sequence. In the process of creating animations for each character, I used the very traditional method of making animations in Photoshop to draw each frame instead of using animation software like Aftereffects for the more retro-looking.

Furthermore, when we talked about how the animation will be when the character gets hurts, I think glitch effects will be more suitable for this retro theme concept. I followed the tutorial here to create the glitching effects when the mother gets hurts.

Retro colors theme is another method to give our game an older looking, which actually should be mentioned at the beginning of the post. To match the name of our game, I used a lot of pink and purple with the combination of gloomy colors on the characters and monsters. The colors need to be really simple and flat to mock the low capability of old screens.

How the animation look like when they’ve been placed in the game:

The trailer of Maiden Pink is available here on our game website.