Thursday 19 September 2013

Clear Aesthetics

In today's place after the progress check the team discussed general progress. We looked at sound design and made an extensive list of the sound effects we needed. We also researched music for the boss battles, drawing inspiration from games like Shatter and Intrusion 2. Chris and I also reconsidered our aesthetic for the game. So far he's been pushing this idea of stained glass mosaics as a visual theme, and I feel this has a lot of potential. In all honesty I hadn't put much thought into the game's visual style beyond "it needs to be abstracted from literal tunnels" and having a distinctive and consistent aesthetic will bring an overall quality to the game that it otherwise would have been lacking.
What this means in terms of character and object sprites is we will use far more flat colour and posterise everything. Detail will be sacrificed but this is not necessarily a bad thing. If the sprites are able to be produced faster then I can focus on making the motion fluid and believable.
The other thing this aesthetic focus will bring to the game is give a kind of fable-like quality, as if the game was a story told to small children to make them recycle or something... Anyway, I recently did a render of the water power-up mask which conveniently fit the style (huzzah!).
This kind of singular undertones and highlights will make shading everything so much easier. I've also had plenty of practice with it in the past as it was the style in which I presented my first 243 project. How cute.

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