Hello! 

This is the official dev blog for my game, Project Sarah. In this post, I’ll explain more about it, and about myself.

My name is Andre Silva. I currently study Graphic Design at the Veiga de Almeida university, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Project Sarah is a game I’ve been trying to develop since early 2009. At the time I had just discovered a few exploration games, like Yume Nikki and LSD, and I simply loved the genre. At that time I also found out about Construct (now called Construct Classic), a game-making engine much like Multimedia Fusion and Game Maker.

At the very beggining, it was going to be a game about a ghost girl that would try to find whoever killed her, with the help of a dude.

Then I ditched the concept, but kept the idea of having a girl protagonist. This is where Sarah came from.

After that, I tried experimenting with other art styles, instead of pixel art. I decided to try a “shadow only” game, much like Limbo (which I had no idea existed at the time), too. At this time I gave the girl a name, Sarah.

Using bones animation was pretty easy in Construct, and the animation was fluid. But I didn’t want the game to be completely dark, and kept thinking I’d lose too much if I made it this way.

After some months experimenting, I started doodling a lot and kept trying to figure out a new concept for Sarah.

And then I came up with some pixel art too. I also started creating a story, and came up with an idea that involved she getting killed right in the beggining of the game, by an evil king. I ditched that idea, of course. I also never wanted enemies in first place, and wanted to make this an adventure-only game. 

After that, still in 2009, I started making a prototype for it. 

You can download and play it here:

https://sites.google.com/site/projectsarah0/home/sarah.rar?attredirects=0&d=1

After that, I tried to gather ideas for the game, but I just couldn’t mix 2D platforming and adventuring well. I didn’t want her to get hurt or die in the game, I didn’t want to have enemies, or anything. I wanted to make it an exploration game, where you go around looking at everything, with no real meaning.

Then after 2 years thinking about it, I decided to start fresh, 2 months ago.

I remade the sprites for Sarah, but kept her head since I liked it so much. I also decided to make her taller, because I wanted her to be more grown-up, and I really didn’t like that she had such a big head in the earlier version (too SD for me).

Here are a couple failed attemps to make her more “grown-up”:

And after numerous tries to get her sprite right the way I wanted, I came up with this:

And I’m pretty happy with it! It only uses 9 colors, and that makes it really easy to animate.

Then I decided to start thinking about a story, but I’ll post more about this in the next post.

Also, I want to thank everyone who has been supportive on Greenlight so far! I can’t thank you all enough. If you have a question, feel free to ask, and I’m also open to ideas and comments of any kind!

Thanks!