Mirsartandstuff

During development, this game was called 'Sacrifight'. Before its release, it got renamed to 'Trials of Tonalli'.

After attending a game recruitment fair on campus, I gave them my resume and joined the team as an artist and animator.

I was in charge of making the fourth character for the game, the other three were already almost done. Given a brief character description and personality sheet, I got to work with some ideas.

After presenting a few pencil sketches, the digital rough drafts were created. They really enjoyed the designs I made. At times the social media profile pictures was the character I made.

For each design iteration, the eight directional animations and action sets were rendered. About 1,500 to 2,000 animation frames were made in total. A lot of work but manageable.

That was until the middle of the quarter rolled around. When the campus was closed from the pandemic and other bad news in its wake.

I had a choice to make, should I try and finish the last character's animations or should it be cut? If I stayed and didn't finished in time, the game would be in trouble and that wasn't something I wanted them to go through.

We came to a decision. One of their characters would fill in the last character slot and mine would get pulled. It was a tough but a smart move to play.

The team was very understanding with me leaving and I have no regrets with the project or working with them in general. It ended up being a pretty cool multi-player game with a generative terrain to navigate.

Outside of the planned fourth character, some of my additional work for the game's assets did remain in the final version so it wasn't an entirely lost experience on either side.

Maybe on my own time I'll come back to this character. For now, traces of it exists on the internet and in my own archive.