The Art of Flip's Adventure - A Post Mortem

Some links for more information regarding the game:

Facebook page


I was tasked to redesign the art about 3 months ago, before the start of the Fall semester. Here's how the game looked before:

To the programmers' credit, they did take the effort to find sprites that sort of fit into 1 theme. I quickly did a few  thumbnail drawings and color tests to see how I can improve the look. They gave me full liberties in terms of art direction, but I did not want to go too far off the original template they present me with.

I won't post any of the subsequent production art as I don't want to spoil anything for the potential players. The game should be out for download sometime between Christmas and the start of 2012, so do check back the Facebook page if you're interested. I shall proceed to share some lessons I've learned during this project.

What Worked


More than 50% of the art assets completed before the start of the semester
Fall 2011 was a relaxed semester, by Digipen's standards. However, I was still busy enough to go through a couple of late nights. That's why it was always good to already have much of the project in progress before the start of the semester. I will like to thank the programming team for spending the Summer holidays looking through and approving the art. Establishing a firm groundwork for the art pipeline is quite crucial, and we were able to start polishing and cleaning up by mid term.

Good communication between artist and coders
I think this is the most important thing to nail when it comes to game production. Very often, the artists don't get along well with the programmers, and it really hurts the production. When working on Flip's Adventures, there were very few instances of me having to go back and forth between my own work and the programming side. Everything seem to flow pretty smoothly, and thus the art production was pretty much on schedule for most of the times. Being on schedule allowed us to polish more and eventually add more stuff into the game (including the game story and achievements).

What did not work

Not enough research

This is the main grip I have with the art produced for the game. I have to admit that I was too eager to jump into production. This is my first game in what- 3 years? I wanted to start immediately, and therefore I skipped the research process entirely. And this mistake really came back and haunt me later on during the production. One main complain about the art was that everything looks too blocky because of the tile-based sprite system that we were using. I really should have surveyed other similar platforming games to see how the professionals deal with this problem.


No clear style
I wanted to follow the somewhat Sci-Fi looking theme originally presented by the programming team, but the end result looked like a mash up between futuristic and steam punk. This, coupled with a generic main character resulted in the programming team having to squeeze their brains to come out with a coherent story that can tie the whole game in. Once again, I blame this on the lack of research on my part. Testers mentioned the lack of a 'wow' factor, in which I totally agree.


In conclusion
This project is by no means a failure. In fact, it is quite well received by the lecturers and my peers. However, I do find a lot of room for improvements on my own part, and I'll definitely work harder on the next game project.

Epic Art Time

Here's a shout-out to an experimental site that me and my classmates are trying to maintain.

EPIC ART TIME


We're trying to create something similar to Gorilla Artfare, where like-minded artists can share WIPs and resources to help each other grow and improve. I don't think you'll need to register to post comments, but if you are interested to join the community, just send a message to Max, the admin of the site.

The Later Half of Fall 2011

The character design took a 180 degree turn in terms of style in the later half of the semester. We were supposed to design more animate-able characters. The 1st assignment was to design 2 creatures.

I wanted to do something Beatles inspired. Their music referenced several animals, ranging from birds to raccoon. I picked the walrus and octopus to work on. I reverted to a more traditional approach for the thumbnailing process, choosing to do it with pen on paper rather than digitally. For the final illustration, I tried to mimic the style of Serge Birault (a.k.a Papaninja); especially his technique of rendering slimy smooth surfaces.

The 2nd assignment was to create cartoon/caricature characters. I decided to concentrate mainly on creating caricatures of people that I know personally. Again, I did the thumbnails using pen on paper and eventually my drawing of my lecturers as rock stars was chosen. The guitar that the left character (my animation lecturer) is holding proved to be a new challenge for me as I don't usually draw hard surfaced objects. Overall I am very happy with how this piece turned out.

For the final assignment, we were given the choice of either doing a massive illustration which featured the 3 characters from the earlier half of the semester or the 4 stylized characters from the later half. I decided to go back to more familiar grounds with the earlier half. For this illustration, I wanted to really add a lot of drama, through the use of lighting and texture. I also wanted to fully flash out on the details that wasn't present on the earlier versions of the same characters. This one took a good 30+ hours.

Next up, matte painting class. The 2nd assignment was to construct a Chinese city in a fantasy setting. The emphasis was to create something that was out of this world. I went with flying junks and colorful clouds. I'm not really happy with this painting, as compared to my previous Indian city one.

The 3rd assignment was to create a futuristic city. The lecturer made it clear that he wanted futuristic, not sci-fi; the difference being that one was plausible in the near future. While not a huge fan of the sci-fi theme myself, I do follow Feng Zhu's youtube channel and that proved to be very helpful during this assignment. I wanted to do something different, something that was more painterly than my previous 2 efforts. I still used photo plates as reference, but I tried to paint-over them as much as possible.

For the final assignment, we had to create a short video of an environment, similar to this one I did back in my polytechnic days. Following the success of the previous assignment, I decided to stick closely to the painterly style. We were free to choose our own themes for the finals and luckily for me, I stumbled upon the 'Spirited Away' artbook in my school's library that day. I was immediately sold on the idea of creating an environment that would fit right into the movie.

As I already did one similar matte painting video in the past, I wanted to seek new challenges for this assignment. I tried to integrate 3D into the workflow, using 3DSMax for the river and lantern simulation. It turned out to be quite an easy process, with the help of a plugin modifier called Houdini Ocean.

Besides the above 2 classes, I also took a number of other classes during this semester. One of which was Flash. I won't go into the details of how much I hated Flash (I'm just glad its over) but here's the final animation that was created by myself:

Fall 2011 has been quite a relaxed semester (for Digipen's standards) and thus I was able to be engaged in several other projects. One of which was 'Flip's Adventures'. More on that later.

Midterm updates!

A short midterm update of all my work so far...

Starting off with some character designs.
First up, I had to come out with a design for a clay sculpture assignment. I decided to go with the Chinese mythical hero 二郎神.

Eventually, the 5th one was chosen and I went on to produce a turntable and an illustration for it.

For the illustration, I was given the liberty to follow whichever style I wanted. I've always wanted to try speed painting. One of the critiques given for my past artworks were that they appeared too clean and too polished, almost to the extent of looking lifeless. I also realized that I was spending way too much on each individual painting. So with this assignment, I wanted to push my painting speed a little bit more.

I chose to follow Marc Brunet's painting style, with the patchy brushwork and vibrant colors. I managed to find a few speed painting videos and his custom square brush, which helped me understand his workflow. The final illustration took me 4 hours, which is by no means a speed paint. However, I was quite pleased with how it turned out.

For the second assignment, I worked on a villain character. As the 3 assignments would tie into a final illustration piece at the end of the semester, I decided to stick with the Chinese mythology for inspiration. I also incorporated Alchemy into my thumbnail generation workflow, as recommended by my lecturer. To be honest, I have mixed opinions on it. On one hand, Alchemy does give me unexpected results, and it is certainly a great tool to create unusual and new ideas. However, I do feel like a cheat when using it. In a way, I always come out with the general idea before designing anything, not the other way round where I add an idea into a random design. This leads back to the age-old argument between functionality and aesthetics. I would definitely try Alchemy again, though, to see what more the software can add to my art.

Selected the Chinese thunder god to develop further. No turntables this time around, just the final illustration. I chose to further embrace the idea of speed painting, this time trying to push for more of the 'textured' look and feel. I tried to go for Ruan Jia's art style.

The 3rd assignment was creature design. This time, I had a fairly clear goal in mind. I wanted to do either feathers, fur or scale, and I wanted to follow Sandara's painting style. This meant a slight departure from the speed paints of the previous 2 to pursue a more 'complete' look. However, I did retain some of the principles that I've learned while working on the previous assignment. And that is - to work the image as a whole and not get bogged down by details until the very late stage of the painting process.

As per usual, I sticked with the Chinese mythology:

I picked the 3rd one to work on, and Sandara was kind enough to do a quick demo on how to paint feathers and scales for me.

I also took a matte painting/environment design class this semester.

Here are some of the environment sketches exercises.

The first assignment is a matte painting of an Indian temple city. Spent quite a fair few amount of hours on this piece.

Pokemon

I love Pokemon.

I started playing the Blue version way back in Primary School.I remember skipping meals just to save up money to buy a Gameboy Pocket and the game cartridge. While I did not manage to catch 'em all, I had a lot of fun battling with my friends, with most battles ending in a classic final showdown between Mewtwo and Mewtwo. I did play all the subsequent versions, but the original generation of Red Blue and Yellow holds a special place in my heart.

When I saw this Zelda collage that was created to commemorate the 25th anniversary of that series, I was blown away. This is a piece of Zelda fanart that can end all Zelda fanarts. The sheer amount of details that are crafted into this super awesome artwork is staggering. I can really tell that the artist is an avid fan of the series.

Thus, when my digital painting lecturer called for a personal project as our final assignment, I immediately jumped onto the idea of creating a Pokemon fanart that tries to emulate the epic-ness of the Zelda collage. Multi-figure composition is also another field of study that I hope to explore in. I have always found difficulty trying to portray multiple characters within the same space of the painting, and I was hoping to learn a thing or two when constructing this piece of fanart.

I had several ideas of how the collage piece can look. The original one was to place the characters in a fashion similar to that of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I remember reading about the Zelda Collage on Kotaku, and one reader commented that if there was a St. Peter's for games, that collage would definitely be on the Sistine Chapel. I played around with the idea a little, but realized that the characters and scenes are too separated, which goes against my multi-figure learning objectives.

The sketch is so rough, that you probably can't tell what's going on

I then proceed to experiment with placing characters like how a Marvel comic book cover would. In this way, I was able to divide and break out the page into individual episodes where I can place different groups of characters together. I settled on this idea, with the page consisting of the gym leaders at the left, elite 4 at the top, team rocket at the right and Ash Ketchum in the center.

I usually start a piece of artwork with very loose and sketching lines. Very often, the only person who knows what is going on in these thumbnails is myself, therefore I rarely, if ever, show these to anyone.

I then go on to refine the drawing until it is the viewer can recognize each character just by the lineart. This is the phase where I try to get all the problem solving done. It is always very difficult to try to correct drawing errors during the painting stage, so I try to minimize that by doing a very clean sketch.

Next, I do a quick color test, slapping in tones to suggest the where the lighting is coming from. I switch back and forth constantly between color and grayscale to check on the tonal values. I also keep another window of the artwork, displaying at a smaller resolution, at the side of the screen to make sure that the entire composition reads. This is important as there are many characters present here, and I want to make sure that Ash is always the center of attention.

And finally, the finished piece

This piece took me more than 40 hours from conception to final realization. While it did not turn out nearly as epic as I would have imagines, I am still quite happy with the results. Next time: All 600+ Pokemons!