One of the major issues of the previous release was the speed of my drawing and my ability to create scenes quickly. I'm hoping that a "new" technique to draw all the scenes. I will start out with basic isometric shapes of all the scene elements:

I want the scene to connect up to the final part of "chapter 1", so I want the scene to give a sense of perspective, where Mariska is up high, and gains a view of the city covered in forest, and the factory standing ominously in the background, overshadowing the scene. The camera will pan down as Mariska uses the fire escape, and starts to see the ruin that has occurred at street level. The block diagram is below.

What this will allow is for me to is build the scene on this basic template - adding in the navmesh, paths, and other gameplay interactions, without having to wait for 6 months for a scene's graphic design to complete beforehand.

I'm going to work on a more broadbrush technique for "big textures", using large paintbrushes to cover wide areas. If you can believe it, the "outside bar" scene in the alley, I hand drew every single brick. Why? Largely because I was paranoid that if I didn't, players would notice, and it would somehow impact the quality of the scene.

Of course, the scene had to be dark, and obscured much of the hours of hand crafting I had done. What a fool! With that being said, I am pleased with the next texture (learning from mistakes before), and managed to create a basic texture layer for the front of Mariska's dad's apartment building:

I'm keen to keep the texture colours and so on the same for all the buildings in the city - this is hardly a place where there's going to be a lot of individual expression - the town has built up quickly around its industry, and now started to decay - a nice wash of reddish browns, colour picked from the old scene, and the brickwork copied across does very nicely. I used the "Acrylic" paintbrushes in GIMP with 80 opacity to put splotches of colour that fit with a polluted, grimy town.

I'm really hoping that this approach will yield faster results, and really accelerate the game's progress, and it was almost certainly my obsessive attention to detail that caused such time delays!