Saryma Nieves

Artist Statement

The purpose of my senior thesis was to explore a possible career I'm interested in: visual novel development. Story-driven games are my favorite type of game, especially when there are multiple endings. In these games, you take control of the main character(s) and make the story your own through choices while connecting with the other characters. 

I've previously created a visual novel demo in a group where I was mainly responsible for the coding. I used my senior thesis as an opportunity to see if I was capable of creating a visual novel demo from start to finish, all on my own. I've learned a lot since my first visual novel group project, so I wanted to create something for my thesis that demonstrates how much I've grown as an artist since then.

For my thesis, I expanded upon the concept I developed for my alternative internship over the summer, where I created initial character designs and developed a loose story outline. Another big part of that project and this one, was teaching myself how to use Live2D, which is a program for animating 2D objects in a 3D space. It is incredibly relevant in the visual novel industry and is used to create animated character expressions. I used what I learned from animating one of my characters during my internship to create improved animations for the rest of my characters for my thesis.

View Saryma's demo.

IMAGE GALLERY: COST OF FAME

Click through to enlarge and view individual artworks from Saryma's thesis project.