Unifying art assets and art direction.
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Hello, it’s this time of the week again! So last week we covered redesigning a fundamental flaw in the movement system, it is yet to be implemented but hopefully we will be able to tackle it soon. Great feedback was received from the comments as well and we will have to see how it will work out in the end… Hopefully, it will turn out great! This week, I said I was going to be covering the subject of achieving a consistent look/style in the art for the game. As it happens, this was also discussed in this week’s scrum meeting so the timing is impeccable! So the first workflow we had in mind in order to get a somewhat consistent art-direction across, was to utilize some kind of “waterfall”, where assets are passed down onto one person whose sole job is to attempt to unify the style of the assets. In theory, it sounds like it could work perfectly fine, however… What happened in reality is that the person who had to unify all the assets got completely swamped. Whenever something was iterated and redone, everything piled up and it got messy fast. The lead art realized this and begun working on some guidelines and moodboards in order to attempt to close the gap, so it wouldn’t require as much effort to unify all the assets. See below for one of the guidelines created by our lead artist:
This was a step in the right direction. However, of our 3 artists, the lead artist in skill level is beyond the two other artists who are fairly even in both skill and style of doing things. Thus, in this week’s meeting, it was concluded that the two artists who are somewhat even should do the majority of the assets for the game, whilst the lead artists do the concepts and designs. In the end, it sort of is the reverse of the previous “waterfall” technique we utilized. The technique we utilize for the assets right now is pretty much the following:
The end result can look something like this:
The objects alone doesn’t tell a lot about what it actually is, thus it is very important that there are multiple assets in the same room to clearly give an indication on what the player should have in mind and might expect from being in such a room. (For example, the above object without the red cross would be impossible to tell what it is really meant to be.) Other assets in the room will attempt to indicate in a similar way, both on their own and together that the room the player currently is residing within is a medic bay or similar. On a personal note, I will be hard pressed to ever do strictly top-down graphics again since I find it very difficult to make it interesting. If it is due my low skill level or limitations of the perspective, I do not know, but in the end it makes no difference. That’s it for this week and have a great week/weekend! //Morgan  |
