How Photoshop sparked the design behind this colourful hand-drawn indie game

Metroidvanias are one of the most popular indie game genres, as you can also tell from a recent interview about Possessor(s). Of course, with so much competition, especially from the 'indie GTA 6' that has been Hollow Knight: Silksong, it's more crucial than ever to stand out. Constance certainly shares a similar kind of hand-drawn animated style, but one crucial difference is that it's so much more colourful and brighter. It's rather fitting, too, since the titular protagonist explores and fights with an enchanted paintbrush.

It's also quite a different aesthetic from Berlin-based independent production company btf (also specialising in fiction, shows, documentaries, and adverts, as well as games), whose work I previously encountered was the 2019 graphical adventure game Trüberbrook, which resembled a stop-motion animation with handmade environments.

Essentially, this was down to a new idea pitched by Constance's director, Sebastian Drews, who had previously been at btf as a motion designer working on key frame animations. "I was always in awe of frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation in general because it was a skill I never developed; everything I did was more like puppeteering with key frames," he tells me.

"I love it so much when a key frame that you put by one frame sooner or one frame later, how much it can change the timing and the impact of an animation. So it always fascinated me when people could translate that into something hand-drawn. And since Constance was supposed to be about this painterly world and she's fighting with a paintbrush, it kind of naturally led me towards this look."

The inspiration of Photoshop

Constance is Drews' debut as a game director, having dabbled in game dev as a hobbyist with free engines like RPG Maker, GameMaker, and even Unreal Engine, but where "all projects failed as I could never get anything to run properly." It was finally with Unity, as well as persistence, that the prototype for Constance came to fruition. (Read our best game development software guide for a complete list.)

"The great thing about Unity is I found a lot of tutorials on 2D platformers because this is such a well-known genre," he explains. "I would say that is probably one of the biggest reasons why I actually kept going with this because I found enough resources in forums and on YouTube, so every time I encountered an issue, I was like, 'Okay, let me see what I can find online to fix that issue, and then I continue.' And I could always break through the next roadblock."

With experience in creative tools like After Effects and Photoshop, Drew also saw a parallel with Unity since it was also "the whole package" for making games, from visuals, animations, coding, and other components. Funnily, it was also Photoshop that helped define Constance's most important visual and gameplay hook.

"In my first prototype, her first weapon was just some very non-theatrical energy balls, these circling little dots around her, no design whatsoever, so when I pitched it to the games department in btf, let's be honest, they were not immediately wowed," Drew admits. It was then, looking back over his graphic design background using Photoshop, that a lightbulb came on.

"I was brainstorming with a friend, and the idea that dropped was Photoshop tools, which hasn't been done yet, and the idea was to have not only the brush but many tools - the moving tool, the colour picking tool," he continues. This did, however, introduce a new problem as a lot of these ideas were also quite complicated to implement control scheme-wise, and while the idea of powers based on Photoshop tools sounds compelling. "Also, not everybody knows all the Photoshop tools, but a paintbrush everybody can understand. So we streamlined it, keeping all the ideas that we wanted to do with the tools and trying to make them work with the paintbrush."

Paint and ink gameplay

Games have already made creative use of the motif and mechanics of paint, and you can detect some of those influences in Constance, including indie Zelda-like Chicory: A Colorful Tale. Even the way she can dodge attacks by swimming in paint on the ground is a bit like an inkling in Splatoon, as well as the way that she also leaves paint stains on the environment. The paint and Constance's hair being purple is also no coincidence, as the latter is technically powering the former - use too much of your powers and she actually loses her colour.

"For Constance, purple is very much her identity, and our whole art direction is shaped around this as the tertiary colour. We want all our biomes to have a two-colour scheme, the purple always being the tertiary colour on top of it, and you can always see her very well," he concludes. "We were joking with the community on Discord that if there is ever a sequel, we might have different hair colours, but there are no plans for that, let's just get this game out first!"

Constance releases for PC on 24 November, and you can check out a free demo on Steam.