ART DIRECTION
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Art Direction
LECTURE
ART DIRECTION
Something to consider when setting up stylization
POSITIONING MAP
Use a positioning map based on existing games to locate untested areas of art style that you can use for your game.
ARTISTIC TARGET
You can narrow down from there to create a spectrum of targeted artistic styles that the team can explore and work on.
STYLIZATION RANGE FINDER
Style range finders can help to isolate and identify the range of styles that the artists can work on.
EXPLORING STYLIZATION
Explore different art styles to see which fits the art direction/aim of the game genre and theme
Determine the visual pillars in your production by looking at the central theme of the game.
Refer to the Genre - Style list
Example in visual:
Genre: Casual and relaxed, Survival zombie apocalypse
Style: Isometric style
LIGHTING AND POST-PROCESSING
Lighting and post-processing help to give believable depth to the environment design and encouraging immersion for the players. In AD, post processing helps to adjust certain environment design due to movement of the sun, light sources, angles, or to suit the theme of the scene.
Selections for the color palette will be driven by the ambient lighting, rather than material color.
So that means, each location will have its own palette specifically set to create the right mood for the player.
On top of environment design, the color palette also determines how the UI/UX of your game looks like. Avoid distracting high contrast, but rather aim towards a comfortable scheme that blends with the game, but is clear enough to indicate interactions for the players to take notice of.
The game UI should be consistent in how the players operate actions and interacts with certain stuff (i.e. UX with buttons).
Colors and space should also be unified. You could of course pick more or fewer colors depending on the specificities of your project.
Shape language is the key to designing characters, objects, and environments. Work with signature colors and size combinations to achieve the right design
Value patterns (low and high contrast) help to create boundaries and contrast to define shapes and areas of interest. Intentionally leaving a low-contrast color helps to focus on the areas of higher contrast.
A character silhouette should be clearly identifiable at first glance with distinguishing elements of shape, size, and colors.
This is especially important in character lineup where each one should have significant differences or unique attributes from one to another.
INSTRUCTION
For Art Direction, Ms. Anis told us that we would only work on 1 project for the entire semester. The project is to recreate the art direction among us. We were told to refer to the game Among Us (AU) and Goose Goose Duck (GGD). The goal is to recreate the game among us without actually losing the essence of the game. We will have to maintain the deduction game system, the space theme, and even the name of the game.
Before we started with the planning, we had to play Among Us and GGD first to get familiar with the game. I guess everyone was familiar with Among Us but not GGD. Apparently, GGD is just the better version of Among Us. It's just that the roles can be quite confusing for new players. Unlike Among Us, although they invented roles, the goal of each role still remains clear.
After playing the game, we made a presentation about Among Us and GGD's further research such as the pros and cons, the must-good-nice things to have, comparisons, and further findings. After gathering the research, we started with the planning of our game based on the research that we had found.
Here is our observation finding:
We had a discussion with the team, and Michelle and I came up with an idea to make cats the main character (crewmate). Since cat memes are very popular nowadays in TikTok, I was thinking maybe it would be nice to make the cat character based on the popular cats in TikTok. However, Devina came up with another idea which was to make the whole game a birthday theme where the impostor would be the clown. We then decided to merge the idea and it became cat birthday-themed.
After agreeing with the concept of the game, we started talking about the style we were going for. Most of us agree that we are just going to stick with cute concepts just because we love cute things. It's also easier to be executed. Here are our references:
Well, we decided to make the crewmates hold a balloon and the way the impostor killed them was by popping the balloon. The ghost mode will turn into a depressed cat that uses an invisible tube. At first, we were planning on using color-coded space suits to differentiate each crewmate, but we improved it to differentiate them from the breed and the color of the balloons.
After finishing the whole game plan, we decided to divide the task into 2 people doing characters, 2 people doing environment, and 1 doing UI/UX. the original role was me and Michelle doing characters, Devina and Cecil doing the environment, and Abigail doing the UI/UX of the game.
The reason I put myself and Michelle in character was because we already developed the character. Here is the first character I developed:
Immediately we realized there's a huge difference in the style. Michelle's cat looks very chonky while mine looks quite moderately skinny HAHA. So I decided to merge our styles and create this cat:
Okay, I personally think the left one looks chonky and presentable enough for a game character. In the end, we agreed to use this style. I proceeded with drawing the character's actions such as walking, crying, clowns, ghost mode, etc.
Starting from this point, I divided the task with Michelle. She did all the customizations and I finalized the main actions. Here is the finalized outline version:
I also made the space suit variation since I thought that was the original plan, turns out there was a miscommunication.
While me and Michelle made the characters, the others also progressed very well with their parts.
From this point, things started to get a little bit uncontrolled. Devina could no longer focus on the environment since she was doing the animation, so I had to take over the environment and leave the character to Michelle. I was not too worried about the character since most of the main actions are complete and we just needed customization and Michelle seemed to be enjoying her job HAHA.
Before I hopped into the environment, I refined the logo Abigail created since Miss Anis chose her logo. Here is the original logo:
Here is how I improved it:
Miss Anis said she really liked how it turned out so we decided to keep it this way.
After doing the logo, I started helping Cecil with the environment. During the process, I realized that there were a few things that I wanted to improve from her design. I felt like there were too many empty spaces and there wasn't enough interesting innovation since our theme is from the future. So I decided to send Cecil a few inspirations for her to improve. However, since there were so many rooms, I had to jump in and help her on my own.
I helped mostly with the grooming room and cafeteria. Here are what they look like originally made by Cecil:
I personally think they are a bit too plain. Here is how I modify them:
I think they look not bad after I added a few more stuff. The circle thing in the middle of the grooming room is the entrance. It was an innovative invention where the cats will be sucked up to the room and when they want to escape they have to press the pink cat-like buttons to go back down. This mechanic will make it even more interesting since there is a vent inside the room. Therefore it will be more challenging for the crewmates to avoid impostors who want to kill them inside the room since there will be no quick escape.
For the cafeteria, the big 2 windows are to look outside towards the ocean space environment. Therefore, there will be a bunch of ocean creatures there.
After finishing the rooms, I passed the grooming room to Abigail for her to do the shading and lighting. This is what she created:
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I think it looks amazing and surreal. However, the next problem was Abigail couldn't create the shading for every room because it was very time-consuming. So I had to do the cafeteria on my own. This is what I created:
This is what the game looks like:
I think overall we did great for our art direction. Here is our final presentation:
REFLECTION
I think this is actually one of the modules that I enjoy the most. Honestly, hands down I always enjoy Miss Anis' modules like IVN, Information design, Exploration design, and this. Those are really really fun modules. From this module, I got to learn that art direction is very important when creating game art. There are so many aspects that we need to pay attention to make sure we maintain a consistent theme and style. I also learned how to work in a group better since my friends appointed me as the leader, although I didn't want to. I'm pretty sure I didn't do a great job like how everyone expects a leader to be, but I tried I guess.
For the first few weeks, everything went on very well. We progressed very well and were pretty much ahead of the others. Miss Anis also gave us positive feedback so we were pretty much on track. However, after week 8, I realized that the workload started to increase because of other majors too. In this period, I started to leave behind the character and gave it to Michelle and helped the environment team. There were several times when I had a miscommunication with my teammate and it took me a while to figure out how to fix the problem. The miscommunication took like few weeks to the point where I got quite frustrated. I tried to jump in and help and ever since then it started to get better.
Overall, I think this module taught me about the importance of art direction and how to maintain good teamwork. Assigning each member to do certain work definitely wouldn't be enough as we needed to make sure the styles were consistent. We also needed to pay attention to time management as sometimes we needed to wait for a certain work to finish and then we could continue. It might or might not have destroyed the friendship but I guess as long as we had good communication it would be okay.
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