Final Poster

We are proud to show the finalized poster for Shove Aside! Underneath, you can see the overall process of the poster.

Color Comps

The next task for the poster is color comps.  We wanted to make sure that the color palette we chose conveyed the right atmosphere, so these were the choices we were deciding from.

In the end, we decided on the purple sky to give a sense of mystery.

Line Quality

Today's post will be on line quality. One of the key pieces to the art style for Shove Aside is the thick, graphic lines. As we are going for a gritty comic style, it helps breathe life into the world. In the poster, we wanted as much variety as we could get to differentiate the different materials in the world. The texture of dry patchy grass is different from a thick leather jacket or tree bark. Each part is simulated with different splotches and strokes to best evoke the feeling of that material as well as provide some artistic flair. In the examples above, you can see the different types of line quality used for the base of a tree, Dani's hair, patches of grass, tree bark, Dani's jacket, bushes, and Gabe's pants. Stay tuned for more updates!

Color for the color god.

We've been spending a lot of time thinking about color and shadow recently. Getting the right color to make the environments feel like the northwest is key, so we're using a lot of cold greens and blues. Here are some color comps of our environment.

Design Process for Dani

Hello there!  I'm Danny Huynh, the concept artist for the team.  I take broad ideas and create concept art for characters, environments, and anything else that helps to refine and nail down the look and feel of the game.  Basically, I make pretty things.  Ryan previously talked about the inspiration and direction we want the game to go, so today I'll talk about the design process for one of the characters, Dani.

When I first joined the project, I had a rough sketch and a character background.  I read through to make sure I understood the character, and focusing on the main aspects of her personality, I needed to make a strong willed, outspoken, take charge kind of character.  Before I started fleshing out her character, I wanted to have some of the more key physical features nailed down, namely her hair and clothing.

Clothing and hair thumbnails.

One of my first sketches of Dani.

With feedback from the rest of the team, this is one of the first sketches I did of Dani.  This was before I had the design elements applied.  As you can see, her proportions and style are pretty average.  We wanted something a little more stylized.  Something with the grit of Backwater Gospel, the bold style of The Gorillaz, and the unique rendering of Ashley Wood.  Taking in mind the inspirations for the game, my next sketch came out like this.

Notice the sharper angles, the play on proportions.

For being a leader-type character, I wanted to play with having a heavier lower body to give her a more grounded look.  The other character in contrast is much slimmer.  With this as the newer reference of how I would draw her, I played with some brushes in Photoshop to get a better vision of how she would look with texture.

Dani with texture and thick ink lines.

Near final concept of Dani.

This is the closest to final concept that I've gotten.  Reassessing her design, I decided to go back a few steps to fix some problems.  Her baggy pants wasn't reading quite the way I wanted, and with the jacket, having her come off as bottom heavy was a bit difficult.  So, to remedy the situation:

More thumbnails, more silhouettes, MORE EVERYTHING.

I quickly pumped out some more silhouettes and thumbs to play more on her proportions.  In the end, I've decided to flip her design, making her more top heavy (makes sense with the jacket right?) and to have thinner legs.  Another feature that most characters will have is exaggerated hands.  Most of the stylization will take place more in the body than the face.  Even though the previous concepts won't be accurate to the final design, the work wasn't done in vain.  It helped to visualize what the quality of the final piece will look like, and it'll be interesting seeing how different the final design will look compared to the original sketches!

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.