DESIGN SPOTLIGHT - STRAYER KITCHEN

STEAM POST - KITCHEN BACKGROUNDS BTS!

Hello all, Soren and Yves here today to give you a little behind the scenes peek at one of the background paintings for the game.

Like a lot of the design, art and writing in the game, the backgrounds are a collaborative mix between me and Yves. They're also a mix of photography and digital painting, some of them leaning more towards heavily filtered and photos with hand-painted elements, while others are 100% digital painting.

Today we're taking a look at one that was entirely painted--the lovely, beautiful, not at all grim-and-depressing and disgusting Strayer kitchen!

The kitchen is the heart of the home, which is why I wanted to show off, on every little level that I could, that this one's kind of awful. It's seen better days. It hasn't been properly taken care of in years.

The initial kitchen layout with furniture was created in a simple 3D modelling program, and Yves did a beautiful preliminary painting over that before handing it over to me for final polish. I'll leave it to him here to give you a look into his process.

[Yves’s here!]

As players are primarily looking at Character Sprites and backgrounds/CGs, we want to ensure that there’s plenty of story telling to enjoy while the story plays out.

For the kitchen, it was critical that this CG depicted what the Strayer life is. They have lived here since before the blackout, so things are naturally falling apart, but they don’t have anywhere else to go, so it can’t be a complete mess. It's a working kitchen - things are piled up, dishes are everywhere, but there's space here and there to set down your gun or - heaven forbid - your boots. It’s also a central scene that appears many times in the story, so we need it to be readable as well.

Okay back to Soren to go over the process.Steam post image Round 1: Yves's painting

One of the reasons we specifically wanted to show you the kitchen background was because we have a relic from the old work flow from it still around… a pencil sketch!

Initially, I think our concept of the painting workflow was that one of us would tackle a single background from start to finish. So as the lover of Gunk and Junk and Detritus, I took our initial 3D model of the Strayer kitchen and did pencils over it, basically as a guide to tell Yves (or at least give him ideas) on where all the horrible little detail needed to go.

Steam post image Round 2: Pencils

I drew this on tabloid sized paper (11"x17") in my beloved 4B graphite. While scanning in huge drawings can be a bit of an annoying step in a digital art process, sketching on paper is a lot more enjoyable for me, especially cause it lets me draw while on the couch.

(That's a very important part of game dev--making sure you can physically be comfortable for as much of it as possible.)

[Yves - I second this!]

I wanted to cram as much detail in as I could, creating a space that told as much of a story as it could.

So every cupboard door is grimy. Some are askew--old, shoddy work. The tile counter is chipped, the grout filthy. There are water stains on the ceiling, leaking from disused bathroom pipes in the story above. Cobwebs have been gathering unchecked for years. At some point, one of the fights that broke out in this room shattered part of the light fixture, and no one's bothered removing what remains, or even straightening it out.

And there are the heaps of dishes, the grubby little dish gloves, a mysteriously missing section of café curtain from the one time someone (probably a faithful in pre-blackout times) tried making the place look nice.

It's never looked nice, though. And at this point, it might not ever.

Well, thankfully for me, Yves got really burnt out on painting this background and threw it over for me for the "gunk pass".

[Yves here - sorry bweh ;;;;;]

So I got to go to town on it myself. And I really, really loved the process.

I also made a few textures myself to layer over backgrounds. These were all done in Rebelle, which has really lovely realistic-feeling brushes, but all of my actual painting I do in Clip Studio Paint.

I think it's quite fun that despite using two different programs and having different painting styles and processes, the work Yves and I do together on these paintings looks pretty seamless. Steam post image Round 3: Gunking it up.

Here's the painting after my pass. Everything I added is really subtle, but it all helps bring the piece that much closer to something that looks and feels real. I'm especially pleased with the ceiling texture and just how nasty it looks.

The final step in finishing a background is adjusting levels in Photoshop and sometimes using the Color Lookup utility to apply different LUTs to a piece. It can really add just that extra little bit of "something" (value shifting, color variation) to give a piece its final polish.

I also painted the versions of the brothers you see sitting at the table at breakfast as well as their animations. Steam post image This sketch is called "breakfast boys"

I think it was after this that we either had to make the table bigger, or maybe I shrank them all down in the end cause they were too large…

As the game development's gone on, our painting processes have changed only a tiny bit, with me taking on some backgrounds start to finish and becoming a faster and faster painter.

[Yves here!]

It's been interesting to see how we’ve adapted our workflow, especially as the scope of the game has changed and mutated. I think we would have loved to have spent more time on all our CGS in general, but the kinda combination and ad-hoc nature of how all the CGS have come together gives it a unique feel, which I hope sets us apart in cool way from other VNs who use either entirely modified photos or entirely hand drawn.

That is all from us this week! We hope you enjoyed a look at our process :)

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For this week, we’d love to show off the wonderful Fanart by cheebuss! We love seeing Fisher getting some love~!

Steam post imageSteam post imageIf you have fanart, be sure to post it to Bluesky and tag it #runtVN or @/grimstastestudio! We would love to see it~!!! Also be sure to join the DreadXP discord to discuss theories, characters, and what you are looking forward to the most~!

That’s all for now! Y’all come back now, ya hear?

Love,

Soren & Yves (Grimtaste Studios)