:smbc0:Hi there! This is Mila for those who don’t know, I’m Threshold’s artist. I said last week I would talk about Threshold’s art journey. So here I am.
But first, we need to rewind a bit. With January coming up, Threshold’s going to be a year old. It was originally developed for Global Game Jam 2014. The theme for this jam was “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” When we came up with Threshold’s game design, I was really excited. Whenever I do a game jam I always make an internal goal for myself. I had been doing vector heavy work prior to this game jam, so I really wanted to switch it up with some ink heavy art.
Woody was also making some really cool music for the game. I found that dark colors and muted tones fit the music best. I was really happy with it at the time, even if it did feel very Dr. Suess-ish. I made a bunch of cute assets like mushrooms and trees which is art sugar for me.
There was also some decent animation in our project of our main character. At the time, Hood was, for the most part, very triangular in shape, which we found really fun.So what do triangle shaped characters go into? Triangle shaped doors obviously. And from there we start building this very whimsical world.
We did have smaller issues though.
Eclipse, someone cool enough to
, was colorblind, and clued me in on the fact our game wasn’t colorblind friendly. Most differences of the seasons were depicted by color, not by shape. The other issue was many players were confused by the trees and mushrooms. They thought they were meant to interact with them, and not just there to be cute.
I made it a point afterwards that i would design Threshold with colorblind audiences in mind. A tool I recommend is
ColorOracle (mac/win/linux). It applies a filter to whatever you are working on, including Photoshop documents, and shows what someone with each type of colorblindness would see. I urge anyone who works with color to use it.
So when we wanted to take Threshold further, we had some crazy ideas. One was to make each level its own illustration. They say that even in the vacuum of space you can still hear me screaming when everyone asked me to do this.
This was a mockup of what level one looked like. I look back at it now and theres parts I still really like about it, but these took forever to do, and it was really slowing down our workflow. This also gave a cold feeling to Hood’s world because of all the stonework. I didn’t have a clear direction of where to go after the ink heavy work.
So there was still a lot of soul searching I had to do FOR Threshold. Was it going to be painterly? It took longer but the final results are wonderful. Vector-y? Some odd place in the middle? The first image on the left was a test asset to see what the team felt about the style. Right was a mockup of vector-y app-like art.
At the same time, I was working on Hood’s new design, but didn’t want to go too far where it didn’t feel like the same character. It was here that I began to exhaustively concept the games art style.
I didn’t know how comfortable the team was with how far we could go with Hood’s design. So above was an attempt to keep his colors and silhouette. We wanted to explore more, so i scrapped the old Hood to bring the new Hood.
Regarding the designs above, I think I favored D, which make them feel more like a mage type. Then i considered animating patterns and then was glad we didn’t choose D. I think the combo the team chose was F, N, and G.
I wanted to maintain that Hood isn’t human, but as to what they are, it is a mystery. The most important thing I pushed when designing these hoods was that I didn’t want them to feel like a human in covered in cloth. I felt that if players see Hood as a creature which didn’t need arms or a face, this would help solidify the fact they weren’t a human. This doesn’t stop the questions regarding Hood’s gender or what they are.
Above is the design I proposed. I think we said in unison “…GREEEN…” and wanted to change it up. We did, however, love the watercolor technique I used. I really did too. Little known fact, Watercolor is my favorite natural medium to work with, along with brush pens. Someone said it reminded them of
Mary Blair, and I used this as inspiration for designing from that point forward.
Above ended up being Hood’s final design. This new color and design really made Hood to feel like an inviting character. I really fell in love with him after this, and it became much easier to create their world.
We wanted a world filled with Hoods who live in these interesting floating places with nature around them. Above are some story sketches and color connecting I did. I loved the idea of these long bridges with things growing on them that lead to another interesting floating place. This really recreated the whimsy we had with the GGJ version of the game.
This was a mockup with background and decorative elements on platforms. We then made the decision that the stonework remaining the same color was jarring. and needed an element that would disappear with the changing seasons.
Above is a current screenshot with treetops, the element i chose to be summer only. I had to make sure platforms remained the same shape, so this really conflicted with my cute orb-like trees. Also, we decided the summer assets should not have so much blue as they were confusing when viewed next the winter version of the level.
I iterated again on both the background and the platforms. The colors have changed, winter was pushed into a blue/purple combo, while summer was pushed to green and yellow. Which brings us to our current designs. If you notice I pushed the colors of the keys pretty hard, so they should stand out among other elements and made sure to use different shapes. I also made sure the backgrounds were ready for stacking, since we had been designing some 2+ screen levels like the one below. The last nine months working on Threshold has been a splendid experience. There’s still so much to work on but I’m excited for the challenge.
I hope that was an enjoyable read for you guys, and would love to hear your feedback.
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