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In this section we are going to define the Art Bible of our videogame. It will determine the art style and describe every aspect of the game in terms of what it will look like. It also will help to understand which direction the art takes in order to choose new assets or interface elements that aren’t implemented yet. So it is worth to mention that this guide might change during the development of the video game because of possible new ideas or features of the design department.
From the very beginning of the project we were sure to aim at a realistic and more serious art style. So titles such as “Age of Empires”, “Starcraft” or “Command and Conquer” have been some strong references throughout the art development.
However, the main reference and video game which we have construct all the map with is “Shadowrun Returns”, a TRPG whose art style is based on post-apocalyptic and cyberpunk vibes.
We have had “Fallout 2” as our main reference in terms of character art to make sure the characters blended together with the “Shadowrun Returns” art style.
We have taken inspiration not only from games, but movies. Blade Runner(1982), Ghost in the Shell (2017) or World War Z (2013) are strong references due to the world and environment they are set (sharing a lot of cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic elements).
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Following the art criteria and references mentioned right before, we had to make sure our environment and world transmitted this futuristic, post apocalyptic and chaotic feeling we aimed for. So we decided to set our world in a futuristic and devastated city where the monsters have come to conquer and destroy.
Thereby, the map tiles and buildings have all colder and darker tones to achieve this sad and serious environment we wanted. There is also many elements and factors such as destroyed walls and floor tiles and dirt all over the items that accentuate this ruinous environment.
At the moment we have designed our three main buildings which we will need to achieve and defend. They all share similarities in terms of colors and items (neon lights, broken signs…).
Our playable characters are all very similars in terms of art. As we don’t have a main character, we have implemented five units to choose from*. The colors of all of them are very dark and brown as the map.
Most of the enemies are monsters that have conquered the world. To convey the fear and repulsive feeling we have chosen monsters with weird and scary shapes. The monsters have similar colors as the characters to not be out of place. Here we list some of them.
We pretend to achieve a high level of detail in our graphics as we want to make it realistic and credible. Due to the zoom in our maps, texts of signs or smaller details can be noticed. The relatively big dimension of our tiles (128x64) also helps to see smaller details that otherwise we wouldn’t be able to see.
On the other hand, we have to mention some details that we haven’t achieved but we didn’t find them essentials due to the gameplay of our video game. For example, the proportion between sizes of characters and buildings is not realistic 100% (we don’t consider this a major problem because most of RTS aren’t faithful to scales between buildings and units and this helps to have better vision of them).
Having small variations between floor tiles, walls and signs makes the game’s art more unpredictable and charming and increases its level of detail too.
The main camera of the game is an isometric view. Isometric view helps to represent 3D objects as 2D objects. It is also the most common view in RTS games as it lets you a huge control of the map and a global vision of everything. Isometric graphics have also gameplay advantages. For instance, compared to a purely top-down game, we have a third dimension which means new possibilities at aiming and platforming.
The camera is faced top-down and only covers a piece of the map, meaning the player has not all the field vision at once and that he can move the camera freely as he moves along.
We are also aiming to implement a mini map where you can view all the field and locate yourself with ease.
In this section we are going to talk about the color swatches, hues, color saturation and why we have chosen them. First let’s take a look at the color palettes of the main buildings and characters:
We can see that most of the colors are very cold and dark. Usually, these colors express sadness and negative emotions. Furthermore, they are not very colorful tones (they are low saturated, helping to emphasize the precarious environment).
If we take in comparison the color palette of the movie Blade Runner (1982) which it is distinguished to have a cyberpunk environment we can see that it is very similar to our color palettes from “Shadowrun Returns”. The blue and purple accents of the neon lights and the darker and colder tones of the rest can be seen both in the scene shown below and some of the buildings. This is a good sign that we are achieving what we aimed for!
Note: To extract the color palettes from the images we have used an online color palette generator, link: https://www.canva.com/colors/color-palette-generator/