Art Style, Goals, and Discussion
Posted: Fri Mar 08, 2013 1:40 am
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.
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.