A Changing Art Style

Our art style has changed over the course of the past year, so here are two passages from our design document that demonstrate this transition well. The first passage is from December 2018, and the second was written in May 2019.

First Round (December 2018)

"Over the course of this project, our keystone was the Russian Revival architectural style, and we wanted to convey that by making colorful homes with a simple grandeur.

We have completed a handful of 3D environment assets including the woodsman’s house, pine trees, stalls, windows, and bushes, along with many other assets. All of these objects have 2D textures to go with them. The larger assets, such as houses, were created with the help of concept art, but many of the smaller assets skipped this phase and were 3D modeled from the start.

In recent months, we have done a near complete overhaul of our art style and the process for making art in our game. Our primary goal in doing so was to create a more cohesive art style that brought life to our world, while also setting guidelines that allowed us to have a more efficient workflow."

Second Round (May 2019) "One of our biggest changes has been the removal of all metallic maps in our textures. By removing metallic maps, we’ve been able to use baked lighting in our textures to create a unified light source and help our assets feel more stylized. For any surface that would reflect light, instead of using metallic maps, we painted in highlights and accompanying dark reflections. Painting these highlights in allows us to control how our textures reflect light and how metallic they may appear once applied to an asset in the game.

A large part of our original inspiration for the architecture in Peak’s Shadow was Neo-Russian Revival architecture. However, based on feedback about the architecture and the mood which it conveyed, we moved from this style of architecture towards traditional log cabin style architecture, featuring large sloped roofs and horizontal wooden beams on the exterior. This change resonated better with the narrative design of Peak’s Shadow and felt more realistic of a distant mountain village. Unifying color palettes was also a very large part of our art style overhaul. In our previous semester, we had created color palettes to adhere to for the general atmospheric mood of our game, but did not bring these color palettes into any of our assets.

For all of the assets we created this semester, we used the same color palettes that we had already made to convey the mood and atmosphere of Ember. Not only did sticking to a singular color palette help unify our art style, but it also allowed us to bring strong pops of color into our assets that help define Ember's cold and colorful world."