When doing research for the art guide, I already knew which way that I wanted to take the graphic novel style, I wanted to push the dark grunge aesthetic and have a sort of disturbing feel to the overall environment, so i started to delve in to more dark and haunting games to find the prop and lighting that I thought would be good such as Bioshock 2 and Bloodborne.

The Bioshock franchise has always made visually stunning games without having to use realism, I believe this is because of the way in which they utilize the light caustics and ultimately blend the natural and unnatural lighting, and creating a juxtaposition in the two different colour schemes, I believe this could look visually appealing and lending to the genre of the game if implemented properly. In a blueprint that jack made, it mentions two “haunted windows” at the front of the restaurant, this could be a good opportunity to use a stained glass design and really hammer home a colour scheme, and sticking with the Bioshock unnatural lighting, it could be that dull orange, I think overall that this could make for a really nice ‘spooky’ atmosphere.

I believe that the props and environment could be influenced from Bloodborne all whilst keeping the simplicity of overcooked 2, It gives off a really harsh Gothic feel whilst also lending itself to the demonic vibe of the game, This should create a nice setting that matches the characters within the game itself. The grungy textures of these types of props would also greatly influence the overall style of our game.

The hotline Miami games are fantastic at showing comedic illusion, they can build a game that looks almost child-like with the colour schemes and the overall design and then make the player run around killing people in it,the style versus the game play is completely juxtaposed but I believe that is what makes this game great. I believe that we could possibly establish this in our game although it does run the risk of being too different, therefore causing a negative reaction from the player.

Differentiating from my previous example, we have overcooked 2,a game in which the style completely matches the gameplay creating a visually fun experience, I believe that even though our game is going to be on the darker side, we could still try the simplistic style of this games props, creating the effect previously mentioned on hotline miami 2.

I have also Modelled and animated a few props based on the overcooked 2 simplicity to see what we can work with, however at the minute I just have base colours on them, in the near future they will be textured to look more like the props in Bloodborne.

There are also some static props that i have modelled although they are just rough concepts at the minute, but the lantern captures the feel of bloodborne that I want, but it is far to dense in polygons, so I will remake it with a lot less polys.

I also blueprinted out the first 2 map variations just to get a feel of layout and area size compared to props, this was good as it gave us a rough guide for size and shaping.

1st draft.

2nd Draft

These blueprints really helped me to gauge what type of props we will need and what shape they should be, this was not the final iteration of the blueprints however as jack has took over doing that, but I believe this was still a good guide for environment design.