Art Style, Goals, and Discussion

Discussion and contribution to game graphics and user interface.
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Veneteaou
Posts: 280
Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 4:23 am

Art Style, Goals, and Discussion

Post by Veneteaou »

Trilarion recently posted a great to-do list for the community in the Welcome forum: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5&start=30 . I want to discuss his statements regarding the artwork here in a single thread, in order to keep ourselves organized and on the same page. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding a non-specific art issue, it belongs here.

We have terrain graphics and a start screen and ideas for units, flags, ...

We have ideas for units and flags, although none of them are detailed. I'm thinking flags and such could be culled from random family crests?

We need to get an overview what graphics will be needed

So far, what we have is this:

- Title screen background
- Nearly-completed set of non-continuous terrain tiles
- Random placeholder art.

What we need:

- Completed terrain tiles including overlay tiles for rivers, shoreline, and continuous tiles.
- GUI, including menus, buttons, and icons.
- Military and civilian units.
- Any artwork for the Industry/Transport/Trade/Diplomacy screens.
- Any end-of-turn artwork, including battle backgrounds and animations, any trade artwork, newspaper design or articles, or adviser portraits.
- Any research artwork including the research screen.
- Any artwork or GUI for anything else that exists in the main menu or game menu.
- A digitized remaking of the Belwe font (has to be created in-house to avoid copyright issues).
- A logo.


We need to define a common style

This is already covered somewhat in the design document, and I'd like to reiterate here: we are definitely looking to recreate the art style of Imp1:

- Watercolors and pencil were used for all military units and terrain, for battle backgrounds, and the industry screen city.
- Pencil was used for research sketches.
- IIRC 3DS Max was responsible for most of the rest of the artwork in the game, including animated buildings on the industry screen and the GUI.

I'm currently working on building at most a 16-color palette for continuity in my terrain tiles. When I'm satisfied with it, I will post it here. I'm open to the idea of finishing the whole game except perhaps the GUI in watercolor & pencil, and will move to do so if other artists don't eventually come along to wrap some of this other stuff.


We need to elaborate on the existing graphics

Well this one is a bit open-ended, as we are simply not very far along in the process. Tiles need to be continuous, and just about everything art-wise that I can think of needs to be redone with the exception of the title screen background.
Last edited by Veneteaou on Fri Mar 08, 2013 5:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Creator
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Re: Art Style, Goals, and Discussion

Post by Creator »

the artwork for Industry/Transport/Trade/Diplomacy screens this site has many old pictures and paintings from before the civil war all the way up to WW1. (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/). We could definitely get some ideas from there and even take some of the images and edit them to our liking as nearly all of the pictures are now in the public domain. I was thinking for the transport artwork something like a montage of all the modes of transport throughout our time period. Camels/Horse and cart/Train/Automobile ETC.

We can also grab many of the images for the research images from this site too and convert them to a image sketch to match our goals


I should also be able to work on the look of the GUI. All I need is a list of what buttons and menus are needed and there respective sizes.



Also we need a logo for the game. I have designed some drafts and put them in our dropbox. They are located in graphics/creator/logo

I would like some to have a look at them and give me there thoughts before I proceed with the logo

thanks
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