Validate: Struggling Singles in Your Area is a 2022 video game created by Veritable Joy.
I created a few different motion graphics for Validate. The two that ended up getting used most are a "prelude" graphic and a city vista:
The Prelude
The prelude graphic was originally designed to accompany an in-game prelude before the title screen, and while it is still used in-game, it does not show up in the prelude, ironically.
However, the near-white color, short duration and ability to loop seamlessly meant it would still see extensive use in a variety of in-game and supplementary materials, from character promos to the website to trailers, both as a video and as a still image.
Prelude - examples of usage
A "dot grid" variant also gets used for the in-game menus (above) and the Veritable Joy website.
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The City Vista
While the city vista takes less of a "one-size-fits-all" approach compared to the prelude graphic, it was conceived as an extremely modular tool: the image is broken up into about 10-12 layers, with there being multiple layers of clouds and bokehs to be able to produce parallax effects.
There were about four variants produced originally: dawn, overcast, midnight, and day. The vista was primarily intended to be the backdrop of the title cards that begin each route (level).
Sometimes title cards can also integrate layers from multiple time-of-day palettes: the above intro from the 2021 demo combines the "haze" and cyan bokehs from the overcast card with the landscape from the dawn card.
City vista - examples of usage
There is also a parallax version that loops instead of stopping, which gets used for the final game's main menu.
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Additional works
Beyond in-game graphics, I also created some videos for social media, which usually involved applying similar parallax to art created by other members of the team, and then scoring the video with music that was also made for the game. I produced the music for the two examples below.
Original art by Cindy Thai
Original art by Cindy Thai
Credits
Character promo graphics by Alexis DeJesus
Character social media art by Cindy Thai
Game character art by Yu Yamamoto
