@ryansumo - Gonna try that out! Thanks, always appreciate art advice
@Christian - Yup it sort of evolved from Project CQB after I wasn't making any progress on it. I hope to return to that project someday with fresh ideas.
Which reminds me, I wanted to make a post about how the art style evolved from Project CQB to Lithium City.
This is from the one of the earliest versions. I wanted to keep things minimalist so I could focus on the gameplay, but it got boring to look at pretty quickly.
From there I applied a Gradient Map in Photoshop to turn the darker greys into red and the lighter colors yellow. I also added some subtle gradients to simulate an ambient occlusion effect. This looked good to me and I kept it this way for a while, but I soon realized that it was really difficult to add more colors without ruining the color scheme.
I was also getting stuck on the gameplay. Things did not progress for a month or two, and in desperation I turned to my old friend 3DS Max. I tried modeling a texture-less room with a Mental Ray daylight system + Global Illumination to create the shadows.
I only meant to see how a pre-rendered background would look compared to the minimalist vector art, but as I was modeling I got caught up and wanted to add more and more detail. Soon, I started creating a story about the person who was living in the this room... their job, habits, interests...
I finished it after more than a week, and by then my head was so full of stories that I desperately wanted to make a story-driven RPG. This little room would only be the start. There would be big levels with multiple paths and different skills and equipment and branching storylines and... then I regained control of myself.
Realizing I didn't have the time or money to create a game of that scale, I said goodbye to my little room and tried out an art style that James Abels (the game's composer) suggested - an 80's retro neon look.
Not exactly neon, but I kinda liked the Kill Bill colors. I also added the city in the background after watching a video of this old Aimga game called
. After a while it started to look too simple and I wanted something more cyberpunkish, so I went with purple.
It felt like it needed more glowy things so I tried making the walls glow and added an overlay layer with a circular yellow gradient fading out to dark blue.
After increasing the brightness and adding glowy translucent walls, I finally had an artstyle I was happy with.
The artstyle also directly influenced the game's theme and title. A lot of articles I've read say to leave the art style for later, but personally I feel that a game's artstyle is tied so closely with it's theme and setting that it needs to be nailed down in the very early stages. I'm much more excited to work on this game now than if I has stuck to a blue square against a white background, and to a mostly solo dev like me excitement = productivity.
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