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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperArt (Moderator: JWK5)Art Critiquing for Ludum Dare winning PS4 game
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Author Topic: Art Critiquing for Ludum Dare winning PS4 game  (Read 1282 times)
Alexrose
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« on: December 02, 2014, 07:22:01 AM »

Hey there,

So, I made a jam game in 2013 called Rude Bear Resurrection in 2013, and it won Ludum Dare's innovation category. In April I started work on Super Rude Bear Resurrection.

It's been in The Guardian, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun (several times), The Irish Times etc. etc.

It's been exhibited at Tokyo Game Show (paid for by Sony), EGX (paid for by Multiplay), GameCity 9, The Guardian's Radius Festival, Rock Paper Shotgun's event Feral Vector, the UK's largest game festivals Insomnia51, 52 and 53, Update and Beefjack's event in September.

And now we've got funding. I can't talk about who's funding us until I sign my contract next week, but this has been negotiated for 2 months and all that's left to do is sign the pieces of paper. We launch first on PS4/Vita some time next year.

I'm constantly trying everything I can to make the game look better, but I don't have an artistic art and it's hard, because I also have to do the rest of the entire project, level design, code, marketing, implementing SFX etc. and I try my best on the art perspective, but my best isn't good enough to fix the problem.

The game currently looks like this:



Now, I dunno if the style is working, so we're trying a new one, and that currently looks like this:



The far background, green edge stuff are placeholder, and my artist is fixing the cracks that look a bit like nuts/eggs repeating so they're not as obvious, but do you think this is an improvement? (Also the flame is my own shitty particle system, please excuse).

Like, people have said to me "The art isn't /bad/ it just doesn't wow you". I dunno what I can do to fix the problem, maybe some shader stuff?

The original plan all along was that if we just populated the background with more "stuff" like Spelunky then eventually it'd end up looking really nice, but I can't tell if that's actually true, because I'm not that conceptual, and the amount of work it'll take to do that, it'll be a huge liability if it doesn't end up working, we'd have to redo everything.

SDo you think the art style will fix itself by having more assets (and if not, do you have any suggestions on how to fix that)?

Cheers.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2014, 01:20:58 PM by Alexrose » Logged
sam_suite
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« Reply #1 on: December 02, 2014, 10:47:32 AM »

hmm, ok, I'll try to give my two cents. Take this with a grain of salt, because I am in no way an expert, and probably mostly have no idea what I'm talking about at all. That said, I totally agree that the art isn't bad - but it could definitely be better. There's one really big thing that I'm noticing:

The style isn't consistent.
This is probably the very most important thing you can do to make sure game art looks good. If you have a hundred beautiful sprites, but some of them are painted, some are vector, and some are pixel, shit's gonna look weird. Obviously, your problem isn't nearly that extreme, but you vary a lot between shades of realism and stylistic choices. There are a lot of different kinds of brushes - the mountains are much grainier than most of the rest of the art. Look at the axe, for example. It stands very nicely on its own, but when juxtaposed with the mountains (which also stand nicely on their own) and the relatively low-detail bricks, it looks a little odd. Also, some things arbitrarily have outlines, while some don't, and that font is totally out of place.

Let's see if I can back this up with examples.
Take a look at Braid. Here's a shot from before all of the art was finalized:



Strange, right? That terrain is gorgeous, but it looks bizarre next to the super-glossy cannon, which looks weird next to the cartoony characters. Any one of those styles could look totally great on its own, but it doesn't make sense to mix and match like that. Okay, here's what the game looked like at release:



Damn, that is some nice consistency. Everything is rendered in a smooth, painterly style, and the level of detail is consistent (in the foreground, I mean - the background could get too noisy with too much detail).

Obviously, your artist is capable of some nice stuff (that really is a damn good axe), but you gotta make sure that everything works stylistically with everything else. It looks like you're moving towards that with the latest screenshot, so I don't know if this is useful criticism. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide if you want to keep working with him, but I can tell you that in my opinion, he's capable. Just maybe not consistent, which isn't that hard if you pay attention to it.

So, will increasing the density of sprites make the game look better? I don't know. Maybe. Only if they all look consistent. Right now the problem that I'm seeing isn't that there's too much boring space or whatever, it's that the art doesn't all look the same.

hope that's helpful on some level!
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RyanB
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« Reply #2 on: December 06, 2014, 12:46:44 AM »


Like, people have said to me "The art isn't /bad/ it just doesn't wow you". I dunno what I can do to fix the problem, maybe some shader stuff?

You need art direction and an art bible.  What you have right now is totally random.

You currently have random colours, mismatched detail levels, incorrect perspective, random lighting, brush strokes that change for each asset and floating chain links.

Throw everything away.  Define your art direction/production design.  Then, start making stuff that matches the art direction.
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clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #3 on: December 06, 2014, 01:49:00 AM »

some suggestions, some of it's opinion, but hopefully there's some nuggets of advice in here:

- lower the resolution of your assets: your resolution is huge, which isn't a necessarily a problem, but working with large assets makes it hard to iterate especially when you are stilling trying to nail the art's direction.  Iteration is important and you'll be iterating throughout development until you finally nail it and just coast.

- make your assets within context to other assets: By creating assets in relation to other previously made assets, they end up more consistent with each other.  What I do is grab a screenshot of a level unlit, and use that as the background layer, working new assets on top of that in another layer (transferring after their finished).  I'm having to scrap and redo a lot of tiles because I learned this too late, avoid it early.

- work with a simpler style:  by doing so it's easier to produce, which keeps the project moving (avoiding burn out), and it's easier to maintain a consistent style.  Hand painted graphics are nice but only if done right and not a lot of people can pull it off because it takes a considerable amount of time and skill as opposed to other ways of handling 2d art.

can't tell if you're using normal maps over your artwork or not, but I generally think it looks bad and doesn't add as much as it hurts a 2d game.
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JWK5
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« Reply #4 on: December 07, 2014, 01:00:28 PM »



Golden Rule: If it doesn't look good in black and white it doesn't look good.
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s-spooky g-g-ghosts
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« Reply #5 on: December 07, 2014, 02:24:19 PM »

I agree with the preceding speakers, especially RyanB and sSuite made a good point that you just need to redesign everything into a very consistent world. And to answer your question: no, adding more assets won't help, mostly because of the reasons mentioned by JWK5.
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sam_suite
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« Reply #6 on: December 07, 2014, 02:38:04 PM »

Golden Rule: If it doesn't look good in black and white it doesn't look good.

ooh, that's a good rule of thumb. Yeah, didn't mean to suggest that Braid looks perfect by any means - looks better than it used to, though.
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