These tree tests were inspired by Denki Doodles' blog post "Style Quest: The Tree" where James of Denki talks about establishing the art style for a game by starting off with the design of a tree. The idea is "That object’s design rules — complexity, colour range, geometry — all of it can inform your overall style choice."
I'm not really happy with any of them but I think there's some potential to take a few of these forward in order to achieve a more polished style, so I posted these designs on Facebook in order to get some feedback from my peers.
To begin with a lot of people were just giving feedback on the type of trees that would work best for a horror game (fyi everyone unanimously agrees that pine trees work best) so this was already a sign that my styles weren't varied enough, however after getting people to focus on the individual style of each tree some of the feedback confirmed this, so in my next test I'm going to have to really push my styles.
Most people seemed to prefer the "realistic" pine tree fourth from the left and the water-colour inspired tree on the the right. However the "realistic" tree was the most time consuming to paint by far and someone who preferred 1, 3, 6 pointed out that more stylistic 2D art lends itself really well to horror games (the textured flat style of Year Walk, Neverending Nightmares's Victorian illustration style and Lone Survivor's obscure pixel art are good examples of this) and after playing so many 2D horror games for research I'm inclined to agree with them!
Lots of people mentioned that I should really experiment with the design of the trees themselves so I think some silhouettes are in order before I move on to my next test and someone mentioned I should try making the pine trees purple which I really like the idea of - I should definitely experiment with horror colour palettes. They also mentioned that it was difficult to give feedback on the trees without them in context so in my next few designs I'm going to place them in a more horror-esque night time forest scene.
I've also just had a meeting with one of my lecturers, Ryan. He suggested I test out three really different styles at different ends of the 2D style spectrum - the first just basic geometric forms, the second more illustrative and abstract (such as Year Walk) and the third more realistic and mixing in collages of creepy Victorian photographs (super excited to try that one out!)
He also suggested I look in to different types of fear such as psychological, gore, jump scares and how these different types of fear can be mixed together. Another cool idea he had was to try and create quick 2D "programmer art" versions of scenes from horror films or 3D horror games and discuss what works and what doesn't and how the elements that work can inform the atmosphere of a 2D horror game. Another suggestion he had was to play with the frame rate of my game - 2D games are usually smooth (this is one of the benefits of 2D over 3D,) how would frustrating the player in this way mess with the horror aspect of my game?
So yeah, feeling really inspired! All I want to do now is go home and watch horror films and make stuff, however I've got a week's worth of Gamemaker tutorials to catch up on so I better crack on with those!
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References
Law, J. 2014. Style quest: the tree. [blog]. 19 March. Available from: http://denkidoodles.tumblr.com/post/80060829580/style-quest-the-tree [Accessed 30 September 2014]
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