Oscar and friends

The idea is to have a story driven game about a group of sea creatures on the quest for a treasure chest. By a series of images we could teach pre-school kids some elementary knowledge. At the end should be some kind of advice like that the greatest treasure are friends you have...

Characters are: Oscar the octopus Sandy the sea star Charlie the crab Seamus the sea horse

You can see all these characters and style I would like to draw them on images http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/28406794/ and http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/37145859/ .

Original story

I had original writer who wrote me two pages some time ago but now he has no other time, maybe these two "pages" can help in creating the story. For the first page I've WIP here: http://www.vybiral.info/illustrations/oscar/progress/Oscar-scene1-render.png

1

The ocean had been stormy for the past couple of days. Below the surface, Oscar the octopus and his friends sat on a rock, watching the bad weather above them. They were all happy that the storms never reached all the way down to them. No matter how bad it was up there, the bottom was always calm and quiet. Oscar's best friends were Charlie the crab, Seamus the seahorse and Sandy the sea-star.

“I heard my parents talk last night” said Charlie. “They said something about the surface coming down to the bottom, or something like that.” “The surface coming down to the bottom?” said Seamus. “I have never heard anything so silly! How could that happen?” “I don't know”, said Charlie. “I'm just telling you what they said”. “I have heard that too!”, said Sandy. “It's called a vortex, the water goes round and round very fast”. Oscar looked a little worried. “That sounds pretty scary”, he said. “How often do things like that happen?” “Not very often”, said Sandy. “maybe once every hundred years”. The four friends sat quiet for a while, trying to understand how long time a hundred years was. “Guys, I gotta go home and eat dinner now”, said Oscar. “See you tomorrow at school”.

2

The next morning it was storming more than it had the day before, Oscar could see that on his way to school. Suddenly he saw something strange: The water was moving. He stopped swimming and just let the current take him. After a minute or so, he was back at the same spot where he stopped swimming... Was this the “vortex” Sandy had talked about? Oscar didn't notice that he kept going round and around faster and faster. And in smaller and smaller circles. Then he saw it: the vortex was so wide that a part of the bottom was cleared of water! “The surface coming down to the bottom!”, he thought, just when something hit him in the head so hard that he felt dizzy. When he woke up, he had a bump on his head, and something was poking him in the side. Oscar looked down and saw something sticking out of his book bag. A bottle! He pulled it out. It had a piece of paper inside it. It looked very old.