Blue Hour Odyssey

Blue Hour Odyssey is a game by the video game cooperative Cooking With Goblins, of which I am a member. The game can be found here.

From the very beginning, the conceit of the game that eventually became Blue Hour Odyssey involved a lack of light and a cultural emphasis on lanterns. We explored different versions of this core idea before landing on the one depicted in the finished game.

The intent was always for the world to be dark in a literal sense, without the stories set within in it being dark in tone.

As the team’s artist, my main challenge was conveying this world without natural light without creating a gloomy tone. The game has been described as a “cosy” game and the art style is intended to facilitat exactly that — a world without sunlight, but not one without hope or levity.

The style I landed on is one of a limited palette. Rather than using black for the darkness of the world, I used hues of blue and dark purple. Most light is rendered with a contrasting orange, with the contrast being the lantern light of each of our three characters. It was decided early on that each character would have an associated colour, so a relationship between them an various UI elements or items could be easily conveyed.

Initial sketches. I drew on the middle figure when designing one of the game’s characters, Alex.

Early art style test. This one eventually led to the style used in the game.

Early art style test. This one was decided against as it fails to convey the central worldbuilding element — the lack of sunlight.