Fostering Apocalypse is a game I made as a part of Incisor Studios from February to June 2021. It follows the story of a woman who once lost it all finding faith in a demon who could end it all again. A apocalyptic story about parenthood made in Unity 2D.
I led the art direction, writing, and art asset creation on the project, as well as headed up hiring and production. Our team grew to be the size of four people including myself, with a programmer, sound designer, and music composer, as well as a cover art illustrator.
As art director and producer, I acted as creative lead for the project, making sure the timeline for each deliverable was realistic or adjusted as needed. A game made in the span of four months needed heavy oversight to make sure things stayed on track, and I worked closely with each member of the team to maintain the art direction and execution.
The project kicked off through the making a game design document (GDD) to include all development guidelines, visions for the game, and concept sketches for mechanics. This was an evolving document that grew and changed throughout the four months of development, used by the entire team and referenced consistently as development progressed. Initially, it was just a list of assets needed, but it became out dumping ground for everything related to production and milestones.
Writing the story started with the creation of a logline, distilling the story and its parts into one concise sentence. I wrote multiple story outlines, the first few iteration being further from the initial narrative thesis than I intended. After landing on something I was satisfied with, I wrote the script in one sitting following along with the outline, each section of the outline as its own scene. Dialog was written with YarnSpinner in mind, with specific notes for what character portrait should show, what options are available to select, and how the options chosen branch the story.
The art direction started with the creation of concept art of the two main characters, shown above, as well as mood boarding for the general look & feel of the game. During the concept stage, I also settled on a nine color palette to stylize art assets even further. Fake screenshots were made using basic art assets and generic backgrounds to have a vision of the game to work toward. As well, I drew storyboards to outline which illustrations and assets needed to be created for the opening and ending cutscenes.
Pixel art and animation for the main characters took the majority of development time, working first on the player character sprites using a resource base sprite to sketch on top of and then finalized with the palette-restricted pixel art. Once I was comfortable animating, the other characters were created from scratch utilizing the same sketch to final pipeline.
Environment art was created through a process referred to as "photobashing", where I took open source & creative commons photography and "bashed" them together in photo editing software. From there, I applied the palette and dithering to the background layers in a separate pixel art program, each environment having multiple parallax layers and drawn elements integrated throughout.
Fostering Apocalypse has sold nearly $10,000 worth of revenue over the last two and a half years, with the game being downloaded over 15,000 times. It kickstarted not only my career in game development, but that of many in my team as well. The game has been reviewed in Polygon, ScreenRant, and Indie Game Plus. It has over 50 positive reviews on Steam with a "Very Positive" rating, and a 4.7/5 average rating on itch.io.
Incisor Studios as an independent games cooperative was created out of the production of Fostering Apocalypse, and we have released a second game to date with plans for a third. Del & Barrett's relationship continues to be among my favorite stories I've written, and I had no idea anybody beyond my immediate friends would play it, let alone to this extent. It's a piece of pride for me, and I'm glad I was able to get so many wonderful people to help me make it.
