Creating the Style Pt.1

Hey all, and thanks for checking in on our weekly blogs. I’m Ryan Sand, a man with too many titles, but in this case we can call me our art director. I’m in charge of handling the development and cohesion of our art style as we move forward with the project, so that’s what I’ll be talking about today.

Since we've started working on Kassa, we've always wanted the game to have a dirty graphic style that would match the games setting and themes as well as stand out amongst most other games you’d find on the shelves today. Messy outlines with varied line weight, a dull color palette with spots of saturation, a good range of value, and a painterly messiness to our textures.

With that in mind we began to research a multitude of styles that fit our vision and how others have translated those styles into 3D. We latched onto many of the elements from artist Ashley Wood, and the animated short Backwater Gospel. We've been especially impressed with how well the messiness of Backwater was transferred into 3D, and can’t thank them enough for their making of video.

Ashley Wood, Backwater Gospel, The Walking Dead, and a bit of Borderlands for good measure.

From here we've taken element’s from our research and gave them to our concept artist, Danny Huynh who has worked to combine them into a style of our own. Here are some of this pieces showing the evolution of our style through character concepts.

Danny started with broad simple concepts to nail down the look of the characters. Once he had their look down he started to brought the stylistic elements we researched to the the characters.

As concept work develops we’re creating test assets to bring the style into 3D. Nearly all of our line work is going to be done in texture, similar to Backwater gospel. On this model we're taking advantage of extra strip geometry to give the asset outlines. Right now this is a box only with a diffuse texture, and from here we can quickly experiment to develop our unity shaders.

A simple crate for experimentation. 

The foundations been set and there is plenty more to come as our style develops further.