Hi, my name's Marie Lazar, I'm a 3D artist at Goodgame Studios, and today I'm going to talk about finding an art style for your student or indie game. Now everyone dreams of making a stand out game, something that will draw as much attention as The Last of Us, Assassin's Creed, or The Order. But one of the most common problems not this has run into is the problem of overscope. It's hard to understate how frequent and pervasive this problem really is. But suffice to say I have yet to see a student game that I felt was under scoped. At the beginning of a project everyone feels the unlimited potential of what their game could be. But let's be honest with ourselves for a moment. Triple A graphics demand triple A teams. Creating even a single character in a game like The Last of Us can cost upwards of $100,000 and take months to make, and require the involvement of a dozen highly specialized experts. The purpose of this talk is to get you thinking about ways you can make games that look professional when you only have a few artist generalists working with you. Or even if you're the only person making your game. So with that in mind, let's start with something familiar, pixel art. Pixel art has experienced something of a resurgence in the last few years, as indie and mobile games have really come to flourish. Pixel art is much beloved for its retro nostalgia that harkens back to the days of eight bit gaming. Its small file sizes make it naturally performance friendly, and it's a practical choice for games with a lot of action or precise movement. Think platformers like Super Mario Brothers or RPGs like Pokemon. The great thing about modern pixel art is that it isn't beholden to the same technological limitations as games from the old days. You have the freedom to use special screen effects like blur, screen flares, realtime light and shadows. You can mix resolutions or you even blend pixel art with 3D. And unlike early computer artists, you have the freedom to use an unlimited number of colors and massive resolution sizes. However, just because you have this freedom, doesn't mean you should use it. Theres a history and a craft to making pixel art and it should be respected. When pixel art is done well no more colors are used that are absolutely necessary and every single pixel is in its optimal position. Because of this attention to detail good pixel art also takes more time to do than one would expect. I use to assume it would be faster to pixel a game than to draw one by hand but after working on a few myself I know it could take just as long to pixel a sprite that's 32 pixels high as to paint one that's 64 times that size. For instance, when I made this game, Mirage, as a student. I had to leave the background unfinished because I underestimated exactly how difficult it would be to make the perfect sand texture. Still, working at lower resolutions definitely has its advantages. It can mean big time savings, particularly when it comes to animation. It's possible for instance, to get by with a simple two frame, up, down, walk cycle, or a one frame attack action. That's pretty reasonable, even for someone with little, to no animation experience. Pixel art also lends itself well to tile based games, meaning even a relatively small set of sprites can be placed like building blocks to make entire levels. More recently, low poly 3D has replaced pixel art as the trendy way to style your game, and for good reason. It eliminates the need for unwrapping and texturing when you can spend that much more time making raw stuff to populate your world with. Games that use this style focus heavily on the language of shapes. They don't have all the detail provided by texture map, so they rely on strong composition and color theory to make them interesting. They also allow you to spend more time on other aspects of your environment. If you want to focus on levels with dramatic lighting or show off your fancy custom shaders this could be the way to go. This was the style my friends and I opted for when we made this game, Scarlet for a 48 hour game jam. We two artists were able to model a fully furnished four room apartment complete with balcony, and animate two characters in our very limited time. The level of abstraction that comes along with the style meant not only did we have to make textures, we could also safely ignore, for example, the lip movement on our characters without the game looking wrong or incomplete. You can also combine the benefits if low poly models and pixel art into a kind of simplified retroistic 3D. Your probably already familiar with this style, the sandbox phenomenon Minecraft. Where literally everything in the world is derived from a cube, and the default texture size is a mere 16 by 16 pixels. But your textures don't need to be pixel necessarily, they just have to be simple. 30 flights of loving gets values roughly in John faces his characters in a way that invokes the charm and simplicity of paper craft. Jazzpunk does something similar making characters look like a set of wooden toys. This is the approach we took for Umbrella Party, another game gem game about rallying a crowd during a political speech. We were able to create a whole audience in two days, by duplicating the same character template and giving it different skins. Neither of the artists on this game were animators, but we were able to make some crude actions like face shaking and banging fists within a couple of hours, and changing the facial expressions was as easy as swapping in a new texture. As with scarlet, our simple animations didn't call attention to themselves because the rest of the visuals in the game were correspondingly simple. Of course, just because your team is small, doesn't mean your game has to look retro. If what gets you going is slick high resolution graphics, you're not out of luck. You can still make a great looking current gen game and keep it manageable by scaling down the number of assets you have to deal with. Mobile games already have this figured out. They're restricted severely by download sizes, so it's to their benefit to stream on the number of assets they use as much as they can. The Room is a game about solving a puzzle box, so all the attention is lavished on this one prop. The ditch of the room the game is set in is merely implied by a window in the background. This is also a useful way to scale your project if you're short on manpower. Vanitas was mad with only one artist so it restricts itself to a handful of easy to model nick nacks in a draw no bigger then the phone its played on. Its beauty and minimalism are well suited to the games emotional objective of inspiring bountiful reflection in the player. If you're a character animator or you're working with one and you want to make a game that has characters you may want to design it such that it only requires one. And then put all of your effort into polishing that one character as much as possible. I'm not a character animator as a rule, but I was able to take this contract job for games drawing a cartoon monkey because it only involved one complex character, a lot of simple bird characters, and the one background. This gave me enough free space to experiment with doing extra bits beyond the design brief, like animating trees blowing in the wind, and giving the monkey different facial expressions to show how well the player is doing. Sometimes what you really want is to pull your efforts into an environment with breathing room. That's great. They recommend a first person perspective to go with it. First-person games has been enjoying a lot of positive attention and, despite the mocking title of walking simulator, they're demonstrating that this viewpoint has game play possibilities far beyond the established first-person shooters. The biggest advantage to a first-person perspective apart from being straightforward to program, is that it eliminates the need for a character model. This was a good thing as characters can be one of the most time and resource intensive parts of making a game. want to make a story-driven game but think you need models for your character NPCs? Think again, you've got journals, audio logs, off-screen narrators, and environmental story telling. Indeed gamers have found lots of clever ways of justifying a lack of human characters, whether it's everyone being assumed into heaven or really having left without writing a note. The student game I've worked on, Dust, is primarily a third person game where you sail a ship across the desert while being chased by a giant sand whale. Even though most of the game is in third person, we decided to make walking around the world's hub, a giant stone lighthouse, a separate first person segment. This meant that we could break up the tense sailing sequences with some restful walking ones, and it also gave the player more time to appreciate the subtle background story telling we did with the environment. This is only a small sample of of ways you can scale your visual style. Indie games are a good place to look for more, since more of the leave some kind of shortcut to make their scope manageable. Often these shortcuts lead to new and striking visual styles. For example For Each our Roads of Winter gets this hunting intense look by foregoing surface color and still focusing on material roughness and reflections. Donut County gets its charming story style by getting 3D and foregoing any sort of lightning whatsoever. LIMBO gets its moody look by limiting itself to a grayscale cover palette and depicting everything in silhouette. Simpler still, Thomas was Alone starts with characters and anthropomorphizes them with its strong writing and voice-acting. Of course, if box drawing is out of your league, you can still make a cool character-driven game like Her Story, through the magic of video recording. Or, if you're feeling crafty, you could try animating your game with Claymation as in The Dream Machine. Even if you're not big on the visual arts, you can still craft a compelling world with words, as demonstrated by any of the many, many games made with twine or invent a core mechanic that uses only darkness as in the audio-only game, Deep Sea. Now please don't think I'm arguing against making realistic characters or large texture levels. If character art is where your passion lies, then by all means, make a fully realistic animated human character. My point is that everyone has a limited amount of time, talent, and patience. You have the best chance at succeeding if you focus on what you're most interested in. And look for ways to simplify or abstract out all the other stuff. As the saying goes, a man that chases two rabbits catches neither. But if you decide what your priority is and narrow your scope accordingly, your least likely with a misdirected mess and most likely to end up with something that's appealing, unique and meaningful.
