Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hello !

We are the Atelier Sentô, a duo of French comic artists. We’re fond of adventure games so we used to read those forums in secret.

We are working on our first amateur point & click adventure.
It’s only the beginning and we’d like to share the whole process with the community.
We want to focus this making-of on the artistic side: designing & animating the characters, painting the backgrounds, writing the story, designing the puzzles…
We hope to be able to improve our work thanks to your comments and advice.

But let’s start at the beginning: a general presentation of our game:

The Coral Cave is a 2D point & click adventure game. It will be entirely handmade in watercolors and will feature lots of animations, characters, backgrounds and puzzles!

The player controls a little Japanese girl named Mizuka who lives on a small remote island, in the Okinawa archipelago.
One night, she has a strange dream. When she wakes up, a terrible danger is threatening her village.
Mizuka must explore the surroundings and enter a mysterious spirit world in order to save her island.

Screenshots :

The main menu.

The first room, set on a idyllic beach.

On a mysterious islet.

                         - Sketches, designs & other projects on our tumblr page -

We should be able to show you more screens, character designs and maybe a video soon.
Feel free to ask us if you have any question.

See you!

Love the art.  Looks very promising and professional.

Since you are both French and the main character a Japanese girl, I have to ask what the game’s language will be…Very nice images BTW. I like that art style a lot!

Wow, great art and atmosphere.
I’d love to see some animation tests.
I guess the water will be animated, too?

Wow, that looks amazing and just my type of game.

Inspired by Ghibli at all?

Please keep us updated.

One of the cutest menu screens I’ve seen in a while - love the toad character on the designs page too!

Will definitely keep an eye on this

nice artwork.

and i dont mean to be “that guy”, because i assure you, i never really care about political correctness, however…..why is the main character’s eyes always shut.

I mean im not going to pretend that japanese people dont have slightly different features, but this looks like a jump into the deep end of quite a distasteful stereotype.

I knew you weren’t japanese when i saw that image because no japaense people see themselves that way.

as i said, i dont mean to be “that guy” but it was the 1st thought that came to my head after seeing the painting, so i feel i had to point it out.

Idrisguitar - 07 June 2013 03:28 PM

nice artwork.

and i dont mean to be “that guy”, because i assure you, i never really care about political correctness, however…..why is the main character’s eyes always shut.

I mean im not going to pretend that japanese people dont have slightly different features, but this looks like a jump into the deep end of quite a distasteful stereotype.

I knew you weren’t japanese when i saw that image because no japaense people see themselves that way.

as i said, i dont mean to be “that guy” but it was the 1st thought that came to my head after seeing the painting, so i feel i had to point it out.

 

You’re over-thinking it, man. The character style looks like a play on traditional Chinese/Japanese ink paintings, which have character faces with eyes that look exactly like that.

Here’s just one example:

thanks for enlightening me.

excuse my ignorance and i wish you the best of luck with the game.

Thank you so much for your messages!
It’s really motivating to read them.

Here are some answers to the questions:

Since you are both French and the main character a Japanese girl, I have to ask what the game’s language will be…

We are planning to do an English, a French and of course a Japanese version.
It won’t be a problem for the texts.
For the voices, we plan to do something a little bit different than the regular voice acting… but we’ll have to make tests first. And then we’ll ask you if you like, OK?

I’d love to see some animation tests.
I guess the water will be animated, too?

Yes! And the water animation is a very difficult problem.
Here is a test :

And you can follow this link to see another one.
Does it looks OK? We should be able to show the character animations soon!

Inspired by Ghibli at all?

Everything here is inspired by our travels in Okinawa, the people we met and some films shot there… and of course, we are huge fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s films!!!

and i dont mean to be “that guy”, because i assure you, i never really care about political correctness, however…..why is the main character’s eyes always shut.

I mean im not going to pretend that japanese people dont have slightly different features, but this looks like a jump into the deep end of quite a distasteful stereotype.

I knew you weren’t japanese when i saw that image because no japaense people see themselves that way.

as i said, i dont mean to be “that guy” but it was the 1st thought that came to my head after seeing the painting, so i feel i had to point it out.

Oh, this is a really interesting comment.
We often create stories set in Japan and for each project we try to use a new kind of look for our main character. Look at our previous heroin, Natsuko.
For the Coral Cave, we decided to draw her with the eyes shut for 2 reasons:
1-We met some kids with those eyes in the countryside during our last trip and we loved their faces.
2-It’s easier to animate the character this way and it may look better when she is very small in the background.

We understand the problem isn’t “should the character have her eyes shut or not?” but the fact some people may take it as a distasteful stereotype.
We don’t have an answer to this problem.
But we’ll hope that, when playing the game, people will fall in love with this small okinawan island and its inhabitants, just like if they were exploring a real one.

Again thank you for your comment.
We’ll keep it in our mind while working.

thanks for the thoughtful response.

consider me excited to play this

good luck!

Amazing artwork - I love the style. VERY excited about this game!

Thank you!

About the eyes:
Is it better this way:

Does it wipe out all the ambiguity?
If not, can you give us clues to do that?

We would be very grateful if you could help us.

I really don’t think that’s necessary. (And it changes the form of the cheeks, too.)

The water animation looks great so far.
Perhaps you could slow it down a bit, if you can do more frames and avoid too sharp angles where the single waves meet.

I prefer the eyes the original way without a dot.