Stray

This is the cover to "Stray", a game programmed by Patrick Knight and Holly Fletcher last year for a Digital Game Design course they took last year.  I attended a Concept Art class that paralleled that class, and I was assigned to draw cover art for their game.  The game involves the player walking along a path and gathering "memories" as he went.  The player was sure to die at the end of this path.  (In other words, it was like the mini web-game Passage.)

The game, as Fletcher and Knight programmed it, would change seasons as the player went on, so that became the main idea for the cover here, going from spring on the left to winter on the right, and summer and autumn in-between.  The art in the actual game was all squares, as that was the engine the professor of the Digital Game Design course allowed his students to use.  Since the game was so abstract, I chose to represent the "memories" on the cover with that purple flower, another natural symbol to go with time passing as seasons.  Not only is one planted in the spring, but the ambiguously-shaped shadow also carries one as it walks.  I tried to make the person as ambiguous as I could to allow either gender to associate with it a little better.