Have you ever thought the Purgatory storyline could have been handled better? Me too! So I am making a video game where Sam looks for and finds Dean and goes to Purgatory to try and bring him home. The game will be equally Sam- and Dean-centric, with Cas as a supporting character in Purgatory and Kevin as an advisor character in the Human World. This is a long-term project whose progress depends on my free time and motivation. I'm posting this in hopes of getting feedback of any sort -- artistic, game-play related, ideas of how Purgatory works. So even if you have no interest in video games, I welcome your input!

This is what my game will not look like. ^_^ Are you kidding?!



The game is being created with the program RPG Maker MV and I'm using graphics programs Game Character Hub and FireAlpaca. FireAlpaca is a great FREE program for making digital art. The style is retro Japanese Role Playing Game.

There are a million parts to making a game but today I will talk about the Purgatory art I have done so far. It's not finished by a long shot. I'm making the tileset, which is like making the Legos from which to build the maps. So I draw a scruffy pine tree, for instance, and then I can put thirty of that tree on a map.
The tree looks okay to me on a clear background, but put it on the mulch and I notice the needles need work and the shadow at the base looks too dark. There is also the challenge of making the tree branches stand out from the background while still being similar because presumably the forest floor is fallen sticks and bark as well as dead needles.

Ignore the people in these pictures. They're just so you can see the scale, I haven't put any effort yet into making them look like Dean, Cas, and Sam.
The non-mulchy areas are supposed to be bare dirt or rock but they don't look like it yet. The large areas of sparse grass don't please me. I think I'll redo them from scratch. But I like how the clumps of plants look and the brambly stuff. The hardest thing to draw so far was the mulch. Because it has to tile, meaning I have to be able to put lots of squares of it together but it can't look like squares in a grid. Because that wouldn't be mulchy.


"But xoferew!" you say, "Why is your Purgatory so bright and orange?" It's easy to make colorful graphics and then lower the saturation, not easy to go the other way. And a natural looking forest could be useful for something else, later. So I'm starting with that. I'm still deciding what to do but perhaps the first, easier stages of Purgatory could be more naturally colored and then as you get deeper into the dangerous recesses of the game, the color gradually drains out? Like so:
Or I can just make it all equally desaturated.


So here are some questions: How is the fog level? Does Purgatory have a day/night cycle? Do people need to eat in Purgatory? Because if so I need to make berries, mushrooms, Purgatory kale, what-have you. I hope they need to eat because that will be more interesting. I'm going to make a stream/pond, so I can have fishing too. Are there animals in Purgatory or just monsters? Are the trees etc. alive, or is it all illusion like in Heaven? I'm guessing there is a real, living ecosystem. What about the monsters? Are they all technically dead? But they still eat, that's their motivation for killing each other? Do the monsters with human-level intelligence have villages or dwellings of some sort? What happens when a monster is killed in Purgatory, it disappears? Respawns later? Please share your knowledge and theories!!