Art Blog Post

Art Blog Post

Emily Ratsavong

For this milestone blog post we will be focusing on the art processing and reflect on focus group feedback from milestone 2! The art that was prepared for the second milestone included some concept art for game scenes as well as some assets. The theme of our game is exploring a worn torn kingdom from long ago and unveiling what happened. So as an artist I want the environment to play a large role. Additionally, since a big part of our Kingdom game includes survival and exploration I felt that the art for our environments would be the most important. The concept art I drew to get a feel for our game world included the main castle scene, the dungeon scene, sketches of the forest scenes, and different versions of the enemies you would encounter.

For the main castle scene, I imagined a run down throne room for the “main base” or what you would interact with in order to upgrade the castle. Another purpose for this scene was to get an idea of what additional assets could be included and how they would evolve over upgrades. In the art, for instance, there are torn up banners and a carpet, as well as overgrown branches. After the castle gets upgraded the branches could be removed and the banners could be restored. This initial scene also gave me a start on how to scale backgrounds and how perspectives might work. During the M2 focus group, the impressions were positives and some feedback I received was how might this art translate technically into Unity. This was prompted by the lighting that is shining through the roof in my art and it helped me think about how to import my art so it could be used by our engineer. 

I also drew the dungeon area from our map to get a better feel of the 

artistic theme and atmosphere that I wanted to portray for our game. 

These are some enemy assets/concepts I presented to the group as well. I explained that I wanted to create shadow like ghosts for our enemies. The above are inspirations I used. I liked the variation and simplicity of the first image. I also was inspired by the shadow like enemies from the PS2 game Ico (the third inspiration picture).

On the left picture I experimented with using a watercolor style brush to achieve that wispy soul look. After showing my initial sketches to my own team, they really liked the first inspiration picture so I tried to incorporate that and created the versions on the right. Instead of watercolor they are solidly black to better match the style of the rest of our concept art. From the focus group I got some suggestions that for different areas of our map, I could give the enemies different attire or weapons to create more variety. Another member from the group also suggested I take another game called Dead Cells for background art inspiration.