What I have noticed for the Concept Art progress is that after we had established a style for the game, it has been a lot of research for me since I am the art director and also the project manager. For the beginning process of what occurred for the Environment Art concept, I started with a storyboard sketch of what it should have looked like according to 3 stages of looks in the level.
This is the moodboard that Jeff came up with that I took and as inspiration for ideas of what the broad spectrum of the environment would look like. A lot of issues with the moodboard was that they relied heavily on black, but since our game was all about looking like papercraft art style, we have to stay away from black as best as we could so we wouldn't lose the depth in our objects and assets. A lot of the elements that I noticed to stick out was the arrows pointing at the character, eyes watching the character, hence making the character feel anxiety. Since anxiety is our main theme for this environment, I wanted to also take the design idea of sharp and hard edged objects and bring it into the picture. As a result I got this:
Here I was able to established what was in the foreground, midground, and background. These are not different levels, but stages of the same level. Each part has its own elements that identitfy it as its own personal area, so the player walking through the environment would know the direct change. After this, I established color choice for the environment sequence:
I went in and I tried different color palettes, and tried to go for a neutral dark color but yet dreamy like since the player plays as a character who is exploring someone's mind in a metaphorical aspect. I think the color palette is unique because a lot of other platform games have very saturated colors, and I thought that would give a different message out to players. So the first panel consists of thorns and the roots of a tree, the second panel has close up mountains that break the character's view while there is a waterfall in the background and people with eyes watching the character. The third panel has mushrooms faced upside down with the floating trees super close to the character. The platforms for this game are construction platforms, so they have gears to establish the different between the organic vs the machine.
Finally this is the mockup environment that I did a drawing of. From this, I am going to continue with more concept art for the environment and also for the assets on our asset list.
Since I am the Art director, I have had to keep track of asset list, tech spread sheet, and also a pipeline guideline which explains how to approach the modeling and texturing for the models. I am super busy, but I will try to do what I can to get this working for the first quarter!
