Concept art
My experience in week five
The source material this week was focused on concept art as a means of testing assumptions, communicating ideas and perfecting the look and feel of our designs.
The Introduction Video by Alcwyn Parker sets out to acquaint us with concept art and describe it’s function as an initial stage in game art development to convey an idea before it is fully implemented, and it’s benefit to us to test or experiment with our ideas to get a better feel for what we are trying to design before we spend hours creating the final assets. The video explains that concept art is as much about research as it is about fast generation of visual ideas, and that to be successful in the field the creator must be multi-disciplined and that being able to paint, draw and model alone is not enough without a solid understanding of design and a good sense of storytelling.
We are shown the work of Phoebe Herring and in her Introduction to Digital Painting video, Herring explains the relevance of digital painting today for both the creation of promotional art and concept art for games, and focuses on the later being her preferred vocation. Herring reinforces the practicality of concept art in getting designs worked up quickly before creating 3D models and in the video she demonstrates a variety of core techniques and practices we can use to create concept art. There is a brief setup guide that describes how we can configure Photoshop as a painters tool, and there are some useful tips on how to draw with a Wacom tablet, all of which I found very helpful being I’ve owned a Wacom tablet for over a decade but never really got to grips with it! There are several techniques covered in more depth including Alt Pick Mixing which presents the benefit of mixing colour on the canvas and utilising the Alt key to pick colours, there are some tips on colour use in that we should avoid shading with black and that we should vary hues where possible, there are some tips on boosting realism by limiting the colour palette and being smart about hue variation, and there are some tips on using gradients and how blending from a cooler darker colour to a lighter warmer one will give us a sense of lighting. The next technique covered is Layout Flexibility where the power of good composition is reinforced and the benefits of using Photoshop to achieve this are highlighted. The final technique is Photo Bashing, the use of which is presented as being partly controversial amongst the digital painting community, being that it can be viewed as cheating but it’s presented objectively that this technique has a plethora of benefits which supersede this and herald this as a very useful technique to adopt. I can vouch for this with experience, I’ve never utilised photo bashing to the extent that Phoebe Herring does in this video to create painted art but I have experience in utilising this technique to create photo-real art for print and digital media so it’s not too far a step for me to take what I already know and then embellish this with some of the painting techniques presented at the beginning of this video.
Tying this to my project
The design style for Escape The App is very flat and vector based, I never had any intention to introduce 3D models or video into the app as it wouldn’t suit the creative direction, however I have been looking for an artistic style to create visual stills to embed parts of the narrative throughout my app. I’ve always been a fan of the look achieved with rotoscoping in the film A Scanner Darkly and the drawing style introduced to us by Sean Vanaman in Telltale Game’s ‘The Walking Dead’ is not too dissimilar to this. I’d quite like to experiment with the learned photo bashing techniques from this week taking inspiration from these examples as well as historical revolution art to drive this artwork. One of the Canvas tasks this week was to create a piece of concept art that illustrates a situation where our main app concept might be used. I’ve chosen to twist this a little to use my time to directly support the development of Escape The App and instead I’m going to attempt to create the artwork to deliver some parts of the narrative before, during, and after game play. There are several screens (or dialogs) that need artwork to help drive the narrative to the user that I’ve listed below:
For now the narrative will be delivered using static images in a more retro RPG game fashion but as the app matures through the cycle of iterative play testing these would become animations to improve the production value.
- Countdown to starting a game: On this screen the virtual games master will say: ‘Get ready to play
{GAME-NAME}, starting in{COUNTDOWN}.’ - New clue available: On this screen the virtual games master will say: ‘The Escape movement have issued a new clue
{CLUE-NAME}for room{ROOM-NUMBER}, do you want to take this now?’ - Confirm take clue: On this screen the virtual games master will say: ‘Are you sure you want to take clue
{CLUE-NAME}in room{ROOM-NUMBER}? Taking this clue will add{TIME-PENALTY}to your escape time.’ - Confirm quit game: On this screen the virtual games master will say: ‘What… you’re quitting?! Really?… are you sure? Quitting
{GAME-NAME}will end the game and reset the game timer back to{TIME-ALLOWED-FOR-GAME}.’ - Successfully completing a game: On this screen the virtual games master will say: ‘Nice one! You escaped
{GAME-NAME}in{ESCAPE-TIME}. You’ve earned a new game rank of{GAME-RANK}and global rank of{GLOBAL-RANK}.’ - Failing to complete a game: On this screen the virtual games master will say: ‘You didn’t manage to escape
{GAME-NAME}. You call yourself an escape artist?! The Escape movement needs you to be better than this!’
You’ll see that I’ve mentioned the ‘virtual games master’ in all of the above parts of the narrative, this is the character I hinted toward exploring in this post. Obviously I realise I’m jumping slightly ahead here being that I need to better understand the virtual games master character/s first before I create this artwork, so for this reason I’ve created a Trello ticket for this requirement here and I’m going to park this task for the time being and revisit it after completing next weeks content on character design.
Summary
In this post I’ve given a brief overview of the content within the source material from Canvas this week and I’ve highlighted what learnings I’ve taken from this. I’ve then outlined how Phoebe Herring’s use of photo bashing has inspired me to utilise this technique to create some artwork for screens in Escape The App to deliver parts of the narrative to players throughout the gameplay experience and I’ve set myself a task to revisit this once I’ve nutted out my character design.