Team Summary:
For this week, the team was fairly not active. Because it is reading break we wanted to be productive but relax at the same time. Based on last week’s first playable, we realized that the game mechanics were too overly convoluted, and the assets were too detailed that our game was at risk of not being feasible as a complete final project. Averi was struggling to complete medium-fidelity environmental assets, while I was dreading the idea of drawing frame-by-frame animations for every stance/movement for characters and monsters. To be productive, yet lax this week, we wanted to find a middle ground for the assets that looked good, fit our theme, and were fast to create. Having simple yet effective assets can help us create more levels and focus more on level design and game mechanics than game aesthetics.
My Contribution:
As the main asset creator, I helped find and create an art style that can suit our needs: effective, fits our theme, and fast to create, while Averi is also creating some concept arts herself. After being shown many types of minimalistic art styles that mimic the aesthetics of Monumental Valley, Journey and Limbo, I wanted to implement these designs into the game. For this week, I created a couple of concept arts that my team can choose or maybe inspire some ideas for our art style. My main focus was to create assets that were quick to make, yet still conveyed a thriller and post-apocalyptic setting. My inspirations came from these links mainly for their minimalistic art style:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=luminesca&espv=2&biw=1366&bih=648&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMwZDMk4nSAhUO8mMKHffNAmQQ_AUIBygC
http://editorial.designtaxi.com/news-gotvector170614/5.jpg
http://www.cosimomiorelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/eXIT-LIMBO-2.jpg
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/b3/ce/78/b3ce78aa481abad599a6515905e7aaa0.jpg
http://img14.deviantart.net/4b68/i/2016/050/e/e/alto_adventure__no_text__minimalist_game_by_lucifer012-d9sern0.png
I started playing around with the line between fantasy and reality of our narrative, to see how much I can bend before it becomes too much of a fantasy game, or a realistic game. For example, a post-apocalyptic world caused by pollution is a realistic and possible event, but sentient and blinding predators with one large eye, or mouth is very fantastical. I tried to contest the idea of a dark world and try to re-define the word “darkness”. I wanted to see a dark and evil world without being too literal with the “dark” element; therefore I created skies that glow eerily/sickly green, which can emphasize pollution and pestilence. I also wanted to have a red backdrop instead of just gray to emphasize the red glows from the eyes of Sights. The purple backdrop is also reminiscent of evil, toxic, and malevolent nature. If I were to create a blue backdrop, which are usually associated with bright and sunny days, I would choose a sickly blue like turquoise to provide an uncanny twist to a usually-positive-correlated sky blue. The background and foreground elements are contrasted by using colour. I found the literal darkness-theme of our game to be too much of constraint and in this way we can find a happy middle. The background is easy to create with black assets while playing with their transparency to create an illusion of depth. The foreground elements such as Solis, monsters and some environmental assets like trees and platforms are coloured. I tried re-creating our first playable puzzle in this concept art to see the before/after visualization (two trees, a river and treehouse scene). What’s interesting here is the monsters are gray, rather than black, which is very different from the first concept of our game where the monsters (Sights) have very dark bodies.
I also played with the idea of a really simple and sketchy art style. The concept art with a crumpled paper filter really emphasized the idea of prioritizing game mechanic/level design than game aesthetic; this is because this is the fastest art style to create. All of the objects: Background Mountains, Solis, and monsters are all freely hand-drawn quickly on a tablet, and the entire image is overlaid with a crumpled paper aesthetic to literally push the sketchy concept. Crumpled paper texture found here:
http://www.psdgraphics.com/file/crumpled-paper.jpg
http://www.psdgraphics.com/textures/crumpled-paper-texture/
Both of these art-styles: minimalist and sketchy are quick to create and we can still try to implement a thematic, thriller theme.
My Reflection:
Overall, our team was quite relaxed for this week. We really wanted to change our art style to help our game become more feasible with our time constraint and course load. My motivation to create a simple and effective art-style is to move our hard focus from the “beauty” aesthetic of our game more onto refining and improving the game mechanics and level design. If we can finalize a fast-to-create yet effective art-style for our assets, we can have more time with working on our core loops, secondary core loops, game mechanics/level design, and narrative. However, a potential problem with the new art-style in the concepts art I created was that it may be harder to implement the “creep” factor of a horror/thriller game. Although this may be the case, I find that we can work around this potential issue through better level designing such as jump-scares and better sound effect implementations. These concept arts images only counts for a portion of the thriller aspect of our game, the other large portion comes from level designing and sound effect/music.
