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.