Visual developmentOkay, time to talk about the overall style choice and visual creation process of Yonder.
Early Concept
Our project began with a sense of urgency triggered by various events. This made our pre-visualization phase very short. At most we had a handful of sketches before we started finalizing the style of our game. And so the style ended up a bit more detailed than originally intended. Although production wise this choice did not affect our time budget by a significant margin. Problem solving and decision making are still the two main factors that consume most of our time.
To save time and to aid our process we created a colour script that emulated one in-game 1080p screen of each planned environment. We then created around five colour variations of each piece and printed them out so that we could move them around to try out a number of different colour moods.
Our expectations were that we would be able to extend from said pieces to complete each entire environment and as a result save time on our layout creations. However, since we created the colour script before we had finalized interaction, event and story planning we knew that changes would be unavoidable.
Creation of layoutsAfter we had decided on a style, we started roughly sketching out the entire game which mostly consisted of doodles and notes. This helped us finalize some of our harder decisions regarding story and the overall player journey. The most time consuming parts of creating layouts for us are interactions and story events. When complications occur, whatever they may be, we find it is best to move on to a different part in the process as to not get stuck and return to the issue another time.
Another time trap is Photoshop document structure. Keeping our documents tidy really helps save time. Since we are working with a lot of layers it can easily get messy if we don’t organize. Creating a place-holder document with groups, layers, names and overall structure setup is a good way to streamline things.
After preparations are made, we start extending on what we have from our colour script and earlier layouts. When we don't have a clear image of an environment, it helps dropping in references or textures to create a collage for inspiration purposes. Whatever tool or shortcut that can speed things up, within limits as to not affect the quality, we try to use it. This is also the part where we drop in shapes that we created earlier during our pre-production. It’s basically a matter of filling in blanks and trying to keep in mind shapes and framing.
When everything is sketched out, it is all finally ready to be coloured. We tend to work a lot with masks so that it is easier to change or tweak colours. Colouring is probably the quickest part of creating the environments since we already have the colours picked out from pre-production. Although final changes will be made to fit adjacent layouts.
And last but not least is time management. It is vital to always have a bird's-eye view of a project so that it does not grow too big in terms of time and scope.
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