Katherine Johnson Meets The Mongols

Katherine Johnson Meets The Mongols (Indie Game Project)

Brief:

This project involved me creating a game based off of an random historical figure (in my case Katherine Johnson) and a chosen time period (Feudal Japan). There was also the limitation of a 640x360 resolution, a 32 colour palette and a max player sprite size of 64x64.

Game Concept:

With these limitations in hand, I came up with the concept of the player being Katherine Johnson and trapped in a simulation of the second Mongol invasion of Japan. The player then has to find rocket parts, while defending the coast from the invading Mongol fleet by firing miniature rockets at their ships.

Production:

The first stage was to create a game design document. A part of this involved making an initial layout of the levels.

This was the level layout for Hakata Bay, the main playable area

The level layout for the tutorial

After this I moved onto the initial previsualisation of the assets:

Katherine Johnson:

The initial Katherine Johnson sketches

I then converted these sketches above into pixel art (ordered from 1 to 3)

Mongol Warriors:

The initial Mongol warrior sketches

After this I converted the sketches into pixel art (order 3 - 5):

Once this was done I moved onto creating sketches for objects and locations:

I then moved on to creating production versions of the sprites:

One of the standout assets I developed were the 8-way directional sprites for Katherine Johnson. This was my first attempt at making assets of this variety and I feel the end result is acceptable.

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

Another standout asset was Hojo Toikume, the NPC that instructs the player what to do. This was based primarily off of a single artistic rendering of him by Shikō Imamura:

Hojo Tokimune Consulting Mugaku Sogen about the Mongol Invasion:

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/hojo-tokimune-consulting-mugaku-sogen-about-the-mongol-invasion-imamura-shiko/OgF84mQ2inqELA?ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.4947031398230639%2C%22y%22%3A0.5052968601769361%2C%22z%22%3A8.910814724874689%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A2.929620587452345%2C%22height%22%3A0.9849358542403538%7D%7D

Sketches: