The Art Style and Elements

As the game was designed to be set in the 1980's we were assisted by our lecturer to rather go for an Art Deco or Art Nouveau style instead of a classic noir detective style.

I preferred the Art Deco style as I like the golden colours, metal and intricate designs. However, as our game had a very strong underlying floral theme, I decided to combine the two styles.

I chose the colour scheme of gold and blue for all the User Interface (UI) elements. I wanted the text and gold designs to look like metal, therefore, I gave them a linear gradient colour to create the shiny-metal effect.

There were a variety of elements I could create for the title and menu screens, however, I didn't want it to look crowed so I mainly designed corner elements and a few elements that could be used to underline the title and help split the title text from the buttons underneath it as seen below.

Learning to implement these compositions in a game has been an interesting experience. I have previously worked in Adobe Photoshop, which is a layer based system, this has helped me a fair bit with exporting the layers individually as the games students only needed for example one corner element and they could duplicate and flip them to make the other corners. This did help speed up my workflow as I focused on only making the single elements so they could be duplicated.

However, as I wanted all the elements to have clean lines, I decided to work in Adobe Illustrator. This was a challenge as I have not spent much time in illustrator, but I found it a good experience as I used my iPad with the Illustrator pen tool and this proved effective for what I was trying to achieve. I was able to draw a rough outline of the shapes from the reference images and then edit the line with the bezier curve handles.

I used this technique for the various UI elements and the design for the back of the cards. I created the floral fan design by combining two different elements. I then designed the twisted lines to help the repetition and add a flow to the design.

A key asset I made that includes both the Art Deco style and my own stylisation was the map. I wanted to highlight the town and keep it a main focus but also not have it floating on its own. That is where I included the Art Deco style to show the rest of the map.

The other art assets I made were some images for the cards, including portraits of all the characters. These were stylised drawings that I have developed during this project.

I created the portraits using a variety of layers, clipping masks and alpha masks.

I blocked out all of the different colours such as the clothing, skins, and accessories.

I created clipping layers to make the shading stay within the boarder of the colour for the item I was shading. This helped with general shading.

To further help with more fine detailed shading I used an alpha lock, which only let me colour on the items colour.

I used these same techniques to create the images for the other cards such as the waste spill, autopsy report and letter.

These are all implemented into the game. I am proud of how the game looks as a whole. I think together as a team we have developed a fun and entertaining game.

I have enjoyed working on this and I believe I have learnt more about my own art style as well as learnt a lot about the creation process behind different games.

Here you will find the link to the full game run-through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4e7nKmLA44

However, it is 24 minute long video so I have also included the shorter version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euDXsz2cNiA

Until next time!

Chanae