After being briefed on the assignment we broke into groups with the game design students, in my group was, Animation- Scott (me), Asia, Alyssa and Cor. and in games was Issac, Jordan, and Oisin. We talked about ideas, then broke into smaller groups and did idea generation, which entailed coming up with 10 ideas then collectively narrowing down to our best idea.
The first idea we settled on was an idea Jordan and Alyssa came up with called Giving too Much, which follows a rock character who slowly degrades and loses parts of themselves to give to others/ NPC’s but eventually gives too much. Our feedback we received from our lectures was to have our game based less on a story but more of a focus on the gameplay and the flow of how we want the player to engage with it. A change was made to the name of game from “Giving too Much” to “Pebbles Pursuit” for our game. where now you are a little rock character and objective is to make it to the last obstacle/ level of the game where the character throws himself into the volcano to stop an eruption.
I worked with Asia in looking at art styles that would work when designing our characters and how they would look. Asia worked on the Pebble character while I worked on the NPC’s/ the background characters.
The direction we wanted to go in for the art style was to have lineless characters with more detailed backgrounds while still leaning into the illustrative aspects and not so much relying on realism. We looked for styles that would allow for some dynamic and cartoon like shape language and posing, something that would look very dynamic in a game. Ray-man legends was a game we really liked the look of and was a big inspiration with its simple characters and focused designs and make for a really appealing appearance, other works included Sky-landers and Paper Mario.
As a group we started looking where are game was gonna be set in. Like what time period, or country. Was it going to be set in our modern world or a world that was built on a fantasy? We eventually settled on a look/ layout of our environment that would look interesting for our backdrop. We were looking at Swedish villages and towns, which had a cute and soft look which fit the style we were adapting. However, at second round of feedback the lecturers didn’t understand why we were basing it on Sweden, since Sweden hasn’t a history of existing volcanos. So we switched to Iceland as our main source of design inspiration. While Alyssa and Cor got to designing our landscapes, me and Asia got to looking at the style of characters. During this part I looked at culture of Scandinavian people, looking at towns folk and the outfits they would wear and then try simplify those complex details of the outfits and narrow down to the necessary elements. While of course looking at character lineups that would inspire their shape language and appearance.
Eventually, after some feedback we had built some towns folk. Some concepts of how a family would look in our populated village. During this lineup I needed to ensure that the characters all look good together when paired. This meant having some differing and exaggerated proportions, while making their shapes clear and silhouettes identifiable.
So in the final part of the process I had to adapt the art style we went for with a test concept on the child character. During this process I made sure to note down the texture used while using aspects from the our inspired art styles such as our soft shape language and cartoony proportions. Making sure that it also looked like our NPC character looks different enough while making it clear that he lives and breathes in the same world as our Pebble character was very important.
This is also the slide that I contributed to for our presentation.
