Since our game has narrative beats where Abel will make remarks when interacting with the world, we thought it best to try and have portraits like you often get in these styles of games. I started by looking at other pixel art games to get a good idea of what I wanted to do. Originally we were going to do a pixel art sprite to see how it would look but, to cover all bases, we looked at various games that use portraits and text boxes to see which style we would be going forward with. Below are the games and visual examples.

Stardew Valley:

Wadanohara:

Celeste:

Hades:

Dream Daddy:

With all of these designs, you can see the various styles from pixel to refined portraits that are absolutely stunning. While the idea of having it be pixel art was a good idea, every time I tried to do a version, I ended up absolutely hating it. It was too small and with the dimensions, I was trying to work with, it ended up just looking low quality and awful.

I also used Clip Studio Paint for all of my artwork as it has multiple export options, so I usually chose to use this platform of art program the most.

With that not working out, I then decided to try something else, more on the theme of Omori.