Conceptcookie.com - Exercise Practice Sheet: Painterly Style

Before I start the scenery art tests for my game I wanted to get some more practice working in a painterly art style.  I took part in this exercise from conceptcookie.com in order to get some more practice.

Admittedly I totally rushed the last two however I feel that throughout the process I definitely started improving and am beginning to get a lot faster working in this style.  However my use of contrast definitely needs work - for instance the barrel looks far too flat and could do with some darker colours around the sides to emphasise its form.  I also need to work more on rendering softer materials like hair and feathers as my attempts in this exercise look too blotchy and messy.

Tree Tests Round 2

For my second bout of tree tests I created 6 trees in a variety of different styles from the art style spectrum proposed in my last blog post.

These styles included:

A blend of realism and illustrative.  I knew from previous research that artistic realism would be too time consuming to achieve, and I really wanted to try incorporating vintage photographs in to my designs (which Ryan suggested a few weeks ago.) This Photoshop collage created out of vintage photographs of Halloween costumes was the result.

My take on a geometric style.  Not as true to a geometric style as it could of been - the games I have researched that use the style tend to use much more basic forms for their assets - however I couldn't help but play with sharp angles and minimal colour schemes for this one.

A textured illustrative tree, inspired by Year Walk.

Another illustrative tree, this time inspired by watercolour and traditional mediums.  I used watercolour Photoshop brushes for the base colours and used a brush designed to emulate charcoal pencil for the outlines and detail.

A painterly style tree.  This is a style I would love to improve on as I feel this style in general is such a nice blend between the digital and traditional.

And I couldn't resist doing a pixel art tree.  I've created some basic pixel art in the past however I've always wanted to try a more detailed design like this.

General feedback:

- Pixel art is overdone
- Painterly style is cliche
- Geometric style tree (2) has nice colours
- The third tree needs more contrast
- I should be wary of how a collage style would work in the context of a game.  Could be too busy and confusing.
- 1, 3, 5 are more stylistic and professional looking.

So 1 (illustrative/realism collage), 3 (illustrative, textured) and 5 (painterly) were the most popular.  My next steps are to create a forest scene in each of these styles then test out these scenes in Gamemaker with an assortment of atmospheric overlays and music.  The style I feel adds to an "unsettling atmosphere" the most will be the direction I take my game in.

2D Game Art Style Spectrum

I've created this representation of a "2D Game Art Spectrum" to aid me in finding an art style for my game.  To my knowledge (based on all the 2D games I've played/researched) the spectrum consists of six visual genres: Pixel; Geometric; Cel Shaded; Illustrative; Painterly and Realism.

Pixel Art

Pixel art tends to be used in games that aim to evoke nostalgia for games of the 8-bit and 16-bit era and, as a result, often appeal to the post-core gamer demographic.  It is characterised by it's low resolution, raster graphics which are edited on a pixel level.

Mega Man X2 (Capcom 1994)

VVVVVV (Nicalis 2010)

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (Superbrothers 2011)

Geometric Shape

This art style is characterised by heavy use of standard, you guessed it, geometric shapes.  Many games utilising this art style may have been developed by a team without an artist and thus turned to a minimalist geometric art style due to its ease of creation (this may have been the case for The Impossible Game, for example, pictured below).  However other games have used this art style much more stylistically, almost crossing over to the "Illustrative" category of the spectrum. By making effective use of colour and mise en scène they achieve a simple yet beautiful geometric art style.

The Impossible Game (Flukedude 2011)

Thomas Was Alone (Mike Bithell 2011)

Chasing Aurora (Broken Rules 2012)

Cel Shaded

2D cel shaded games are characterised by their use of simple block colours (usually consisting of a base colour, highlight and shadow) and thick line art.  I personally find 2D cel shading to be quite a commercial art style as it seems to be used in a lot of casual/social games.  This is likely because it is a very neutral and therefore accessible art style that most target demographics find acceptable - as opposed to a very stylistic game where the art style would likely be more subjective.

BattleBlock Theatre (The Behemoth 2013)

Skullgirls (Lab Zero Games and Reverge Labs 2012) 

Plants Vs Zombies (PopCap Games 2009)

Illustrative

Illustrative art styles are the most varied out of all the styles on this spectrum as they tend to depict the game artist's personality and personal art style.

Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall)

Tiny Wings (Andreas Illiger)

Child of Light (Ubisoft 2014)

Painterly

This is a popular art style and games that use a "painterly" art direction are often praised by critics for their aesthetic appeal.  A painterly art style "relies on colour and working with balancing the different hues to create value" and "is recognizable by 3 different factors: use of colour shifting, visible brushstrokes, and fantastical lighting." [emboldening mine] (Von Rueden 2014)

Bastion (Supergiant Games 2011) 

Dust: An Elysian Tail (Humble Hearts 2012) 

Rayman Legends (Ubisoft Montpelier 2013) 

Realism

From previous art tests for my game I can confirm that, although many find this style very aesthetically appealing, realism is the most time consuming and difficult style to achieve.  This is likely the reason it is very difficult to find examples of realistic 2D games.  Many early games, such as the first Mortal Kombat games, attempted to achieve a realistic art style though were still bound to pixel art due to technical limitations.  Nowadays most games that utilise realism tend to be games of the point and click adventure genre, as most only require static background images and no complex animation (which would be very impractical to achieve in this style).

Tormentum (Ohnoo)

Mortal Kombat II (Midway 1993)

The 39 Steps (The Story Mechanics 2013)

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References

Week 7 Sketch Dump

Trying to get better at sketching environments.  This turned out really scribbly and the cross hatching didn't really work out the way I thought it would to convey tone and lighting.  Think next time I'll focus more on perspective and line work (and not use a biro.)

Live drawing from various places in London.  Still struggling to achieve clean, accurate flowing lines but I think I'm improving a little.

Some animals from London Zoo.  Need to pick better, more contrasting angles when rendering planes with straight lines.  I think the gorrila or the tortoise shell is the best example of this.

And finally a bit of life drawing using brush pen.

For week 8 I think I'm going to try and churn out some more detailed environment studies as I feel I've really been neglecting them lately despite environment painting being a major skill gap.

Week 4 - 6 Sketch Dump

Apologies for the lack of sketch dumping.  Been focusing on coursework after hours a lot recently which has left a lot less time for personal drawing.  

Sketch of a cool building I saw on my way home.  I want to start trying to do more on scene environment drawings like this because I feel it really helps me to build my visual library and work on my perspective drawing too.  

 Some drawings from a recent day trip to Broughty Ferry.

Stylised portrait.  Trying to render the planes of the face with dynamic lines.  Starting to get a bit more likeness of the subject when doing these kind of portraits but still got a long way to go.  The features are a bit wonky in this and I need to take more care measuring the distances between them for a more proportional likeness.

Starting to think more about the design of the protagonist of my game.  I always like to start off my character designs by doing random doodles of ideas before moving on to the silhouetting stage.

Raven Mocker for Sketch Dailies but I messed up the hands.

Doodle, mainly practicing rendering hair in pen.

Continuous line drawing.  Never tried one before but they're really fun to do and something I'd quite like to improve at.

Doodle of some sort of forest scene.

Life drawing.  This was my first attempt in a while (and it shows).  I really struggle with 1 and 2 min drawings because I focus too much on copying the pose exactly which is impossible to render in such a small time period.  

In this attempt I allowed myself to be a lot more scribbly and take liberties with the poses.  It felt a lot more natural and a lot less stressful.  Still lots of mistakes in all these drawings and I'm definitely going to have to be stricter with my life drawing if I want to see any improvement this year.  I think I'm going to start incorporating it in to my daily routine as a half hour warm up in the mornings before I start working on coursework. 

Lots of foreshortening issues (and what is going on with that neck??) in this one but I think I'm starting to feel more confident using pen for my life drawing work.

Next week I'll be down in London for the Strawberry Thief launch party and plan on doing lots of live drawing practice.  Really trying to improve on using pen and ink so expect lots of messy work using my new brush pen!

Semester 2 - Week 6 - Progress Presentation

For my project I'm looking in to creating atmosphere in 2D horror games.  

2D horror games aren't very common and I was curious as to why that is and this gap in the genre is something I'm really interested in exploring.

My aim is to create a 2D horror game using Gamemaker that successfully conveys a sense of suspense and apprehension through an unsettling atmosphere.

The questions I want to answer are:

"How important is art style in establishing atmosphere?"  For example would a cute, vector art style work if all the other elements of the game were horror esque?

And "What are the benefits of a 2D art style over 3D?" which I think is going to involve a lot of researching 2D and 3D horror games to answer.

I'm also really interested in how perspective can be used in horror games.
"Is 1st or 3rd person perspective preferable in a 2D horror game?"
and "How can 1st person perspective be achieved in 2D in spite of the limited degrees of movement it allows for"

And the more I've been reading the more I've realised the importance of the influence that old media such as horror film has had on horror games so that's something I want to look in to too.

Exploring 2D horror game art styles is going to involve lots of media tests.  The Dundee games company Denki do this thing called the tree test when they're trying to establish an art style for a game.  The idea is that establishing the art style for one simple asset is a jumping off point for designing the rest of the game world.

So this was my first attempt but after getting feedback I discovered all the art styles were way too similiar and it was too hard to judge them with all the different tree designs fighting for attention too.

I've done some tree silhouettes to help inform attempt number two.  Most people seemed to prefer tree number 9 so I'm going to recreate that tree in 5 very distinct styles across the kind of stylised art spectrum - so on one end of the spectrum I'd have a very blocky, Thomas Was Alone Style geometric shapes sort of tree, in the middle a very illustrative maybe like watercolour style tree and on the other end a more realistic tree.

Then I'm going to create a forest scene in each of these styles and test them out in gamemaker and test a bunch of different animated atmospheric overlays on top of them and decide which style I think would work best to convey an unsettling atmosphere.

And of course I'm going to be researching 2D horror games too but I'll talk a little bit about that later in the presentation.

When it comes to 1st person vs 3rd person perspective in horror games I've found quite a few arguments for and against each of them.

For instance Tanya Kyzywinska argues that first person "heightens the illusion that it is the player sitting before the game screen who is being attacked, rather than an abstracted virtual self." and of course this level of immersion is something designers really want to achieve in horror games particularly, because it's more scary for the player if they psychologically feel as though they are the character with the horrific events of the game happening to them.

However Bernard Perron argues "... the player is more affected when they see the character being acted upon" and Petri Lankoski eleborates that "this can be likened to the cognitive/emotive coupling or mirroring that enables the player to share the experience of their avatar" so third person can be just as immersive or arguably more so than first person because of this psychological connection between player and character.

And once again I've also been playing lots of horror games to explore the use of different perspectives which, again, I'll touch on later in the presentation.

 The relationship between horror film and games is really interesting because horror games borrow a lot of techniques from film.  I've been watching a lot of horror movies for research and doing lighting studies of certain scenes.  I really liked the dramatic lighting of this scene from Cabin in the Woods on the right, and the atmospheric shot of Alien on the left.

Survival horror in particular borrows a lot from cinema for example cutscenes, cinematic camera angles such as those seen in Resident Evil, and old film overlays.

I'll briefly talk about a couple of the 2D horror games I've been playing.  Lone Survivor is a survival horror game by Jasper Byrne which uses overlays to obstruct the players view

It also works really well in conjunction with the pixel art as the obscure environment assets can look really gruesome such as in this screenshot where the pipes look like intestines in the red light.

The use of third person perspective in this game also worked really well because of the mechanic where you would have to hide in certain sections of the wall to get past enemies and I found it really intense psychically seeing exactly how close monsters were from catching me especially with the first boss monster.

Year Walk is a horror, exploration game and is the only 2D horror game I've come across that uses 1st person perspective and it works really well with the gameplay and flat, textured cut out art style. Some 3D elements have been integrated where perspective would have been an issue such as a creepy wooden doll you can spin around, and these objects stay very true to the art style and work surprisingly well.

The game also uses a subtle camera shake and old film style overlay throughout which adds to the creepy atmosphere.

I also feel it's important to work on my art fundamentals throughout the year so this is some of the work I've been doing that's not directly related to my project but I still feel is important for me to work on as an artist.

Feedback:

-Overall good presentation.
- Good balance of reading and practical work
- Scope could be an issue.  Need to start considering game design.
- Play Alien: Isolation.
- When playing games take note of what works in certain games but wouldn't in others [e.g. Chase scenes work really well in Lone Survivor but wouldn't in Year Walk due to their perspectives].
- Look in to "the uncanny"
- The use of obscure environment assets is interesting, look in to how art style can be used in that respect more.

I was also asked what I'm learning from all the the games I've been playing but because I'm so awful when put on the spot I didn't really know what to say despite all the notes I've been taking while playing.  However I've updated my last post on 2D horror games with a section at the end dedicated to what exactly I've learned and it was actually really helpful to list all the things I think work the most effectively in 2D horror.  I think it's really going to help inform my game's design, which is what I'm going to focus on next.