First Steps

My friend Theki got me to play the RPGmaker game Muma Rope with him on Yume Nikki Online. Its first large area, First Steps, really surprised me thanks to its awesome contrast between dark gray rocks and neon-green grass. So I decided to paint it for practice.

Going from memory, making this took me about 2 hours…? Which would be fine if I hadn’t worked on this at 1AM, ending up going to sleep real late. This last detail contributes to my unsatisfaction with this painting: when I paint from reference, my main goal is capturing the reference’s mood/atmosphere. And I don’t think I’ve done a great job at it here.

First of all, the grass in the game’s location has a noise pattern for bright yellow-ish spots, which I had no idea how to replicate. The solution I decided upon was painting a few splashes of a yellower shade of the grass’ green. In hindsight, I should’ve scaled down my reference screenshot and used the prevalent shade of green/yellow that the grass had there.

Other than that, I went too light with the amount of flowers dotting the place: the game features way more of them. I think the rocks look pretty good, probably the moss I added at their bottom helped to make the grass-to-rock transition feel more natural. That said, I should’ve made their edges look sharper.

The fence at the cliff’s edge looks fine enough, although having more of the cliff itself show might’ve been nicer. To wrap up the painting analysis, I intentionally skipped proper shading since it is not there in-game, and I thought it would’ve ruined the looks… but on second thought, it would’ve probably helped a lot to make this not feel as “off” as it does.

Now, a few words about Muma Rope itself. While I didn’t have any solid expectations for the game, I would’ve never thought this game would’ve struck me so hard with some of its locations and overall difference from Yume Nikki and 2kki. The worlds’ artwork is pretty consistently high-quality and I love how nearly every world has its own gimmick, be it gameplay-related or just in the visuals. If you’re into Yume Nikki or its fangames, you should definitely check this out!