Sneaky Ninja – Art director – First post

This will be my first blog post as the Art director in the group Sneaky Ninja. We was one of the latest groups to be created so we have had one week less to work than most groups.
Despite that we have had a very productive first week and I will cover the major art related problems we solved.

We had a small meeting on Sunday the 6th of April where we talked about the concept and discussed ideas. We started working the next day on Monday.
We had no idea initial idea about how our game should look when we started. The guide lines we had was that the main character was a ninja like guy who was going to sneak into some kind of building, maybe a castle, to steal something.

What we did first was to gather as much reference images and sketches as we could to determine what our game should look like. One thing we talked about on the first meeting was that maybe our character should look a bit like the character from “Subway Surfer”.  We liked the proportions but we thought we should go with a slightly more realistic proportions, the legs looked a bit to tiny and the head was a little too big.

We decided that the setting would be inspired by feudal japan and that a painted texture would give the game a bit casual look. We looked at a specific Japanese castle for inspiration called Himeji castle.
Link:  http://www.digital-images.net/Gallery/Scenic/Japan/Castles/Himeji/himeji.html

We had a vague image of what we wanted our game to look like and while Anna and Viktor made base meshes for the alpha I read up on color theory and tried to create a color palette for the game.
We decided early on that it would be night since there would be no point to try to sneak past guards in full day light.  So I had an idea to have purple and blue for the shadows and yellow – orange – brown for the lighted up areas to compliment the cooler colors.  I tried a lot of different color palette creators but the one I found most usefull was Adobe kuler : https://kuler.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

Here was the finished color scheme, a bit unorganized thought:

(The gray in the upper left is the character color )

At this point I was not sure that the colors would work so I made a mock up of  a level. To keep it simple I made a top down view while the game is going to have a slightly tilted camera.

So this is for now the colors we are going to use in the game.

Other than the art style we have made sure that the units in unity and 3ds max to match up.

More updates next week!