One of the first major challenges I came across was solidifying our look. My team has been great with constantly providing input and feedback, but it is up to the artist to define how all of these ideas translate to the game environment. Being a one man art team makes this a rather large task and possibly the most important contribution you will make. I am still working on defining exactly what our game will look like, but I will leave some tips and mistakes I have made in the process so far.
The first and most obvious of course is reference. Make sure you gather hundreds of images that possess elements of the style you wish to achieve. You can never really have too much reference, so spend a day just grabbing images. Even hunting for the images will help you think more about defining that actual look in the mind. One of the mistakes I made when gathering reference was not being specific enough with what I was gathering. I would take tons of images from games that I was inspired by and photos that followed a certain color palette. Now these are useful but when it came time to blocking out some models, I hit a creative block when designing the style of the architecture and various other props that will populate the environment. I had an idea of what I wanted, but nothing to help guide my mind on how to apply that to a real object and keep it cohesive with the rest of the scene. So fill the reference folder with everything you think you may need...and then some.
Now you have some models in their low poly stage and you are working on a few textures and maps to get the first prototype done. Normally for my personal projects I would start texturing and see what works. However when everything needs to look like it comes from the same world (you wouldn't see a bunch of glowing tron colors in a angry birds universe) a bit of pre planning can go a long way. One thing that may help is getting the color palette down as soon as possible and spending extra time refining it. For our game we have two factions going against each other so it is very important that these can be distinguished instantly from a distance. The reference images helped design repeating elements across the meshes and now the color palette will help tie this together to solidify the fact that these buildings and ships could co exist in the same environment and with their proper faction.
These tips may sounds obvious, but they are often missed in games. Not spending enough time on designing a personal look could make the game look like every other "default unity asset" look you see in early access these days. Even designing a "realistic" looking game like GTA takes heavy art direction to keep it from looking bland.
Take these above photos as an example and yes I know comparing GTA to big rigs is not fair but I wanted to show the two extremes to get my point across. Dont pay attention to the model quality or even texture resolution but do take a close look at the colors that pop out to you. Both games are trying to mimic the look we see in every day life. However when looking at the color palette in GTA you can see a bit more artistic direction. Once again, not talking about reflections, the pretty water or any effects, but just the color used. You can tell that GTA is slightly more saturated than real life along with emphasis put on the contrast, where big rigs is more of a "look out the window and copy that" color palette. This does not just happen or come along with a stronger engine. It is a creative decision made by the team. Probably a bad example but the point stands, even if you plan to mimic real life, still spend time defining the artistic direction and the results will show. Lets face it, real life often looks bland in the colors that we see, why do you think so many photographers run their photos through Photoshop.
So thats it for today, keep an eye out for the next post in our game development journey. Once we work some things out, I will be following up with some details on this game I speak of.
