Devlog 09: Reflections on our Art Direction

Hi! It's Salisa, the 2D artist for The Day The Sky Fell! As we deliver the first look at our game, I wanted to take a look at how our art style developed, and where it could've gone better. 

During our Beta critique, we had one major piece of aesthetics feedback that really stuck with me: from the pitch of our game, they'd expected to see something stylized. They had very clear feedback on how to achieve this, from inspirations such as Makoto Shinkai's work to using shaders instead of what we'd done with handpainted textures. 

In hindsight, going for a stylized route should've been obvious.

At the start, I'd mistakenly only loosely focused on art direction. My thought process? There was only two of us, and I was doing all the concept art. However our styles combined, it would look cohesive because it was the same two people. That was a mistake--I'd sorely underestimated how different my own art could look depending on the day. 

The second issue was that from the start, we'd been concerned with efficiency, and most if not all of my concept sheets were to be translated into textures for the 3D models. This meant that I often worked in flat views -- front and side -- which, unsurprisingly, meant we ended up with a lot of flat assets. In the long run, this made our work lack the asymmetry and dimensionality that could've felt more dynamic.

To my understanding, along with lack of time and need for modularity, these were the main issues that sidetracked our game aesthetics. 

One game we discovered recently that highlights the look we would've loved to achieve is Unbeatable! The Kickstarter is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dcellgames/unbeatable/ . The color direction and how they mixed 2D textures on 3D models, with that blocky stylized assets is exactly what I would've loved to achieve. The lighting and chromatic aberration filter applied in post-processing really builds an ethereal mood--versus how in our game, while I used chromatic aberration, we'd baked it into the painted textures. 

I want to end off with a bastardized quote from one of Steve's final lectures: that if you can't make it look good, just make it look consistent. I underestimated how much a consistent art style would hold a game together.