watercolor indie game by atelier sento set in japan




About

A young man working as a doll maker lives in the Japanese countryside. It's hard winter in the mountains and everything is slow and fade until a new girl arrives in the isolate village. She's back in her hometown and she's like a sunshine in the young man's life.


Doll Shop is a free adventure game written and designed by Atelier Sentô, based on memories of their life in the Japanese countryside. The graphics were hand-painted with watercolors by students, in 3 days (january 10, 12 and 13, 2018), during a workshop at ECV art school in Bordeaux, France.

Developer: Atelier Sentô and students from ECV Bordeaux
Languages: English, Japanese, French
Genre: visual novel, horror, point and click
Software: Unity
Release date: October 2018
Platforms: PC / Mac / Linux

watercolor indie game by atelier sento
hand-drawn watercolor indie game with students from ECV

A watercolor video game

All the graphics are hand-drawn with pencils and painted with watercolors by students.

workshop at ECV

Doll Shop was created during a workshop with 23 students from the French graphic art school ECV in january 2018. The students drew all the graphics in only 3 days. Each student chose a part of the background (tree, house, mountain...) and drew a sketch on paper. They used a light pad and an 8B pencil to copy it on a watercolor paper. Then, the drawings were painted with watercolors. Finally, all the drawings were scanned, cut out on Photoshop and incorporated into the game. There was a prototype ready with placeholder graphics so scanned drawings appeared automatically in the game. At the end of the workshop, a first version of Doll Shop was projected on a screen, in front of all the students.




UNITY

We used Unity and the plugin Adventure Creator. All graphics are 2D sprites integrated in a 3D area, like a diorama.




Backgrounds

All the backgrounds and elements are hand-drawn with watercolor and the students used documentation to be as realistic as possible.

indie game watercolor character design



Characters

The main characters are a young man living in the countryside and a girl from the city coming back to her hometown. The young man's walking animation is hand-drawn on paper, frame by frame.

indie game watercolor character design

atelier sento and students from ECV

Credits

STORY, MUSIC AND CODE
Atelier Sentô

CHARACTERS
Manon Salomon, Ambre Sedogbo, Emeric Durdos, Dimitri Mazy & Max Simoneau

BACKGROUNDS
Augustin Cagnat, Julie Gouedart Lafeuille, Clément Lavarenne, Hugo Aubert, Coralie Magère, Yoan Vernet, Louis Sorbon, Mylène Aubry, Dorain Touchet, Adrian Malfatti, Baptiste Godier, Maxence Augereau, Clémence Noël, Aurore Sole, Anaïs Linkowski, Aude Marc-Martin & Laetitia Milh.

TRANSLATIONS
English: Josh Tierney
Japanese: Junko Iuchi

Making-of

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