🎨 About Art 🎨
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- Develop a Style Guide early.
- Standardize your asset resolution.
- Designate a core team member to organize external artists.
- Lean into in-engine effects if you have no core artists.
- Artists have different pipeline preferences.
Art Goals
The setting of Leaves of Fate is wacky and features absurd characters with absurd abilities, and we wanted its visuals to reflect that. We settled on using a clean, less detailed style that leaned towards brighter natural colors, taking inspiration from Scavenger’s Reign. We also took inspiration from Adventure Time for the strange creatures and making modern technology feel natural in a medieval world.
Check out our art inspiration here:
For the characters, we wanted to create our own spin on fantasy creatures. The main character was originally a simple slime but eventually evolved into a woodland creature with plant-like physical features. Mixing animals and plant features bled into the design of much of our character designs.
Check out our character concepts here:
Lesson 1: Develop a style guide early.
Despite having art references, we did not establish a concrete style guide early on in our process. As a result our artists filled in the missing details with their own style choices, causing noticeable differences between assets made by different artists.
Lesson 2: Standardize your asset resolution.
We did not do enough research on art asset resolutions or how Godot handles importing assets. This led to difficulty implementing assets in the engine and inconsistencies in how our assets looked in game. Standardizing our asset resolutions and doing research into how Godot processes art would have prevented some of these issues.
What to do when you don't have core artists
Our core team did not have any artists so we had to rely heavily on contract work from external artists. We reached out to artists we knew and offered paid contract work or course credit. This approach got many artists doing contract work for the team, but the lack of a core artist resulted in our game having a less cohesive visual style. Contractors are great for filling in the gaps of your core team, but you still need someone who knows enough about their work to help direct and manage what they produce. We designated a core team member to manage the contracted artists which helped us keep track of their work but it would have been even better if we had a core artist who could better manage them.
Lesson 3: Designate a core team member to organize external artists.
We assigned one core team member to manage all the art contractors that worked on our project. This was crucial in having consistent communication with our many artists. This worked for the management side of working with contractors, but the more that core team member knows about the contract work, the better.
Art During Production
In production we noticed that the lack of a style guide had caused our art to lack a cohesive style. One of our contractors had experience with tech art, so we asked them to implement shaders for lighting and reflections. This proved very successful, as it added depth to the game's art and helped smooth out many of the inconsistencies. After this point we shifted to make use of tech art as much as possible.
In our art pipeline we encouraged artists to import their assets in-engine, allowing them to check things out and make tweaks themselves. In reality, less technically savvy artists found source control hard to use and others couldn’t use it easily because they used drawing tablets. We ended up falling back to having artists place their assets in our Google Drive, which they were more comfortable with.
Lesson 4: Lean into in-engine effects if you have no core artists.
While we got enough art to create the base art for the game, without a core artist to consistently make assets and organize our contractors, art was consistently a bottleneck and strain point. We should have used the programming skills of our core team and focused on what we could do: in-engine effects and tech art. We utilized particles, shaders, and other tech art practices to help add visual flair to the game and make up for the art difficulties we ran into.
Lesson 5: Artists have different pipeline preferences.
We didn’t account for artists being less comfortable importing art directly in engine. If we had a better understanding of our contractors and the art process, we could have set up a pipeline that best supported our artists to begin with.
Art Bible
Want to see even more about art? Check out the Art Bible below for all the details.
Art Contract Agreement
Since most of our art was prodouced by contractors, we had drafted a short Art Contract Agreement to outline our expectations from them and our plan for compensation for their work.