I created this wallpaper pack as part of Strange Pact’s Rekindle 2. The theme of the jam is to pick up something you’ve worked on in the past but not finished, and to take it further.

I started making some desktop wallpapers for the Yurivania series months ago, but I’m still a beginner when it comes to pixel art and I’m afraid I got discouraged and gave up, heh.

This seemed like the perfect opportunity to try again!

I started the jam with the follow initial goal:

"My goal for Rekindled this weekend is to make at least 1 desktop (landscape) wallpaper for the Yurivania series and at least one phone (portrait) wallpaper"

I quickly found desktop wallpaper design just as challenging as I did last time. But! I found that I had several ideas for phone backgrounds that came together much more easily.

Since I only had two days to work on it (and chores I needed to do besides), I changed my personal goal to creating 4 mobile wallpapers instead.

I identified four dyads from Yurivania that I wanted to feature, and settled on the theme of kissing: Stheno & Alraune, Stheno & Kuliltu, Tibby & Josette, and Baphomet & Sophia.

Two of them were immediately obvious, as Yurivania 1 and 2 both end with a kiss. I figured some players would want to remember/relive these scenes. That took care of Stheno & Alraune and Tibby & Josette.

I’m really happy with how the pre-date meetup scene with Baphy & Sophia came out in Yurivania 2, so I decided to rework that scene slightly.

That left me with Stheno & Kuliltu.

Now, they do kiss on-screen a couple times in Yurivania 1, but neither of those moments are particularly visually memorable. Also, while it says in the lore that Kuliltu spends a lot of her time in the Glassy Tarn we’ve never yet seen her there in-game.

So, I decided to create a new scene of the two of them kissing there, using existing sprites and background from the games. This has the added benefit of adding another colorscheme and rounding out the palette for the pack nicely.

After this, it was a matter of figuring out what dimensions are most common for phones in 2022 and producing variants for each of these. Hopefully I covered the most important bases!

About selling these~~

It was important to me to create the original Yurivania games in the open, and to leave all the assets and code up on GitHub for other folks to learn from. Since that was the case, it didn’t make sense to me to charge for them.

But, I would like to give folks the opportunity to help support the development of this series. So, I’ve been planning for a while now to create optional add-on content and merch that folks could buy if they want to.

This is the first step in that.

I set the purchase price at $2, which is the cheapest price you can set on Itch these days that isn’t completely swallowed up by Paypal fees.

So, all in all, I feel I reached my goal rather well!

I still intend to create the desktop wallpapers at some point in the future ~~ probably as a separate pack ~~ but for now I am happy with how this came out.