How Studio Ghibli influenced cozy management game Hotel Galactic

I’m mostly inspired by the melancholy of Spirited Away. I remember when I was a kid and saw the animation on TV for the first time, I thought to myself that this is the strangest (yet oddly the most captivating) story and world I’ve ever seen. It stuck with me as I started creating my own things, inspiring me in my own works.

First, I consider what kind of character I want to portray through my character. Then, I start creating loose sketches showing its silhouette. When I come up with an idea that satisfies me, I prepare three or four more detailed drawings developing this character. Next, I work on the accessories and colors. Finally, I create a clean, separate drawing and a few drawings showing the character and the way it moves.

One of these things was definitely a long analysis and understanding of how Studio Ghibli designs its characters and the important role they play in their works. The magic lies in the fact that each character is designed with the intention of conveying a deeper story.

We started by creating the foundations of the island where the hotel is located. After many changes and corrections, we finally achieved its final shape, and then we focused on polishing foliage elements by improving, for example, the grass model and adding animations of leaves blowing in the wind.

I wanted the guests of our hotel to be pleasing to the eye, and for nature to reflect peace and harmony. Everything came together when we started using soft, pastel colors and, to emphasize the importance of the story, added contrasting dark tones and bold accents for some of the more important plot-related characters.

Since our art style is inspired by anime, we also wanted to add a form of stylisation to the animated part of our game. In traditional 2D animation, not every frame changes like it does in 3D. To match this look and achieve smooth gameplay, we decided to use smooth interpolation for the overall movement of the characters, and step interpolation for their facial expressions, to resemble the lower frame rate used in traditional animation.

We chose Blender software due to its accessibility, the large number of extensions, the continuous development… oh and also because it's free.

We faced the biggest challenge right at the beginning, which was capturing the unique hand-drawn anime style in the context of 3D video game graphics. After messing with it for a bit, we ended up using toon shaders and hand-painted textures on objects and characters to visually convey the spirit of this style as accurately as possible.

At Hotel Galactic, we are loosely inspired by the actual real-world Asian culture; aiming to rather include all social groups, religions, and to draw from many sources. Therefore, in our game, you will see many cultures, including European ones and those inspired by the Hawaiian islands.

My favourites are the characters I designed, especially the Derretys, which are cute, meditating ferrets with cute long necks and even cuter horns. They were the first species I got to design, and I am already nostalgic over them. I managed to capture what I envisioned in my mind on the first try, so that helps, haha.