BGP Week Two: Style Guides

I spent this week animating new animations for Mokhtar, as well as making a style guide, and more concept art.

We realized that we had very little documentation of the actual art style, we all knew it was going to be stylized, with bright colors and an Arabic theme,  but the rest was only in my head and visible in the concept art, so I sat down to produce a style guide and some mood boards.

The style guide points out what the artists in our group have to keep in mind when producing graphic assets, some details are easily missed, even though they are present in concept art.

The picture above is part of the style guide of the cave, and depicts the visual progression of the level. The entrance to the cave is illuminated through cracks in the ceiling, and the colors are a warm orange and yellow. As the player ventures further in, the cave will get darker, and colder, with only a little light produced by glowing mushrooms or braziers. The cave will also progress from a natural stalagmite cave, to an underground city ruin, in which the evil djinni and his minions reside.

We also faced some obstacles this week, as we tried to rig a spider monster, the single minion enemy that was originally planned for the level. Motion builder would only take human skeletons, so one of our artists tried to fake a human skeleton for the spider, which lead to the rig being impossible to work with. We left the spider for the moment, since looking to other software for animation, plus remaking the entire rig would cost us much time, and would possibly not work even then. Instead, we set out to make a humanoid minion. This would not only be safer, but also give us the chance to adapt the minion to the art style and setting, as the spider had been one of the earliest assets created, and wasn’t designed to fit the style nor play any part in the narrative.