Studio V: Conceptual and Contextual Statements
As the conceptual and texture artist I was responsible for much of the visuals of Orbital Drift. I took influence from other games with distinctive visual styles, with an equal focus on the practicality of the presentation rather than just how good it looks. The principles of making a game easy to understand visually apply to virtually any genre, but are particularly important for fast paced combat games. One prominent example is Team Fortress 2, which features a distinctive style intended to replicate mid 20th century commercial illustration, but also one designed to be practical for a fast paced, competitive First-Person Shooter.
In TF2, developers at Valve Software implemented the art style with an intended “Read Hierarchy”, so that the player could instantly recognise:
What team a player was on - by colour, either red or blue.
What character-class the player was using, denoted by the distinctive silhouettes created by varying body proportions, clothing folds, hats and so on. They even went to the lengths to create distinct walk cycles for each class, for an additional level of recognisability.
What weapon they had equipped, by creating a colour gradient that was lightest on the chest area of the character model.
Through the application of these principles Valve was able to make it easy for players to recognise any character even when they were only a few pixels tall on the screen. I worked to apply this same theory with my concept art: I created four different starship designs, each with a distinct silhouette to promote easy readability (Only two of these designs were implemented into the game however, due to time constraints). As I began concept art I looked into starship designs from various universes, from those created by Ralph McQuarrie for the original trilogy of Star Wars, to more modern designs in from games such as Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous. Our game has similarities with these two games in terms of the gameplay, however the art style is very different, going for a more performance friendly and simple cel shaded look rather than realistic textures and materials. The art style is also meant to evoke a much less serious, satirical universe. I also worked to make sure that each starfighter had a distinct paintjob. For the starship texturing I also took inspiration from the designs applied to NASCAR racers, with both ships showing conspicuous branding on nearly every surface. Some of these brands are repeated across multiple ships, alluding to the theme corporate sponsorship.
In keeping with the Alien civilization idea, I developed a fairly simple alphabet for use in advertisements, branding and ship detailing. The initial idea was creating something similar to the korean system which sees each character created from a set of smaller characters. I created a set of 26 characters so that I could just transliterate from English, though if I had more time I would have liked to develop a proper language system. For the purposes of easy texturing and logo creation I created a couple of fonts, rather than having to draw out each individual character every single time. In my research I looked into fonts for Chinese, which as it turns out, require literally thousands of individual character designs. For my fonts I kept them at very regular widths for the sake of simplicity, and designed characters to follow a loose set of rules - vowels contain curved strokes for example, and bilabial sounds such as M, P and B have have a closed square. I found this approach was better than just creating random characters, and it made the script seem much more organised.
Overall the texturework kept a limited palette of bright primary colours to keep the world vibrant, and the objects within it visually distinct. Colour coding objects and scenery is a common practice in video games; Objects that are hazards to the player, such as explosive barrels, enemies and environmental hazards are often coloured red in multiple genres.
Our games art wasn’t the most original, however I think through my research I was able to make it highly functional. Our game as a whole takes influences from similar games in the genre, but we’ve been able to maintain create a distinct “brand” through the chosen art style, which also is effective in game in allowing the player to recognise their targets. I was able to make things look both alien and familiar via the use of an alien alphabet of my own creation, and in the process, worked on fleshing out the corporate themes of this universe visually through advertising. Overall I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made with my research.
Mitchell, J. (2008). Stylization with a Purpose: The Illustrative World of Team Fortress 2. Retrieved June 12, 2017, from http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/GDC2008_StylizationWithAPurpose_TF2.pdf (Presentation at GDC 2008)
Sonnad, N. (2015, December 18). The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font. Retrieved June 12, 2017, from https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/
My primary goals for this project were to create a distinct, and functional look for everything. The visuals of the game are strongly linked to gameplay, particularly in games with a faster pace. Being able to rapidly distinguish different gameplay elements is vital for shooters, if you’re unable to identify enemy combatants it can be a frustrating exercise. I worked to create a look that was:
Tied into the theme and branding we were going for
Allowed for rapid identification of Enemy ships, Environmental hazards and various scenery props
Early on in the development of the game we decided to opt for cel-shaded rendering, which was effective for simpler textures and gave the game a sort of cohesive art style. The textures I created were primarily bright and distinct colours: Environmental hazards and destructibles were red, various props were yellow and the Spaceships had inverted colour schemes: primarily red with blue highlights for the Dualjet, primarily blue with orange highlights for the Rift. We wanted to create a game full of branding for various alien companies, with the Starships themselves plastered with brands like NASCAR racers. To this end I created a number of fictional brands, some parodying existing logos and companies.
In creating the branding for an alien universe I also worked on creating a script for the aliens to use, as having Latin characters everywhere wouldn’t make sense in a place where there are no humans. The script was meant to be regular characters that easily replace latin characters in a font, allowing for ads that look to be written in an alien script but follow an understandable format. I created two fonts, which allowed me to not only rapidly add detail but also churn out advertisements that could be strewn around the level and fit in with the corporate theme. These brands are often parodies of existing brands: Bepis for Pepsi, Rasor for Razer, to add a layer of familiarity in an alien universe.
For the texturing of environmental objects, I kept the colour scheme simple and easy to read, with turrets and other environmental hazards in red, while neutral objects had a yellow paint scheme. Common motifs include the use of an alien script of my creation, lights that glow bright blue and a generally gritty and beaten up look to most of the external surfaces. Textures were comparatively easy to author, as detail was minimal.
I feel however that I could have much improved the overall cohesion of the look with more time, with greater detail and more optimised UV maps. I would also have liked to have created a more handwritten style of font for my Alien script, to create some diversity from the Arial style font I was primarily using, and the Tall sharp font I used on the occasional brand. One thing I discovered was that stylisation is not so easy as one might think - creating things to look realistic takes effort on the materials side, however with stylisation everything needs to follow similar design rules, elements need to be repeated, but in a way that makes sense.
From my understanding of the Games industry, it is typically one person who makes the model and texture both, allowing for a faster workflow, however we split the role up in two given my specialisation in Texturework and Ryan’s specialisation in 3D modelling.Towards the end, Ryan was churning out models for me to texture that were just miscellaneous objects to be strewn around the level, objects I would have like to have had more input in, however we were somewhat strained for time at that stage. In the future I would like to properly learn 3D modelling so that I can keep a much less complicated workflow, not needing to rely on Ryan to fix any mistakes and being able to work at my own pace, and likewise it would improved the group's overall productivity if Ryan learned how to do the texturing, so that work could be split more evenly between the two of us. In the future I need to improve on my knowledge of software such as Substance Painter and Substance Designer to be able to more rapidly produce complex and and good looking material textures.
Overall, I’ve learned a lot this semester, even if the game is somewhat different from our original vision. In the beginning I needed to rapidly create concept artwork for the various ideas we cycled through before we ended up with the idea that became Orbital Drift. I had to learn how to create concept art that was easy to understand and base models off, learn how to rapidly iterate on textures based on the feedback that I was given, and work at different scales as required. I had to solve problems quickly in order to output textures that worked in the game’s engine and were in keeping with our artstyle.
