Blue Hour Odyssey
In Blue Hour Odyssey, you guide three travellers through a world without sunlight. On the way you come across different inhabitants of the world and how you interact with them will affect your travellers’ morale — and should just one traveller lose all hope and head home, the whole journey is a lost cause!
Blue Hour Odyssey was developed by the video game cooperative Cooking With Goblins, of which I am a member. The game can be found here.
Promotional image.
In-game screenshot showing the map.
In-game screenshot showing an event.
Development
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.
Mood sketch of travellers walking toward the northern lights.
Mood sketch of travellers transporting a star back to the sky.
Colour and Light
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.
Process of developing the map.
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.
Characters
We knew that we wanted a mixed group of people travelling together and several ideas for characters were kicked around before we settled on our three “rekindlers”.
As mentioned above, ach character was given their own colours so that said colour could be used for all UI and items in the game related to said character.
Kieran, Claire and Alex.
Early sketches of Claire and Kieran.
Initial sketches. I drew on the middle figure when designing Alex.
Initial sketches. Lantern types coupled with character types.