Creating a consistent art style – 7/10/19

Creating a consistent art style

Hi, I’m Julia Krawiec, an Electronic Arts and Games Simulation Arts and Sciences major attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as the lead artist on Team Blueberry.

We’re already past the halfway point of SIP and all the teams have made significant progress on their projects! Team Blueberry is making a “Match 3 Game” (similar to games like Candy Crush, Bejeweled, and Juice Jam) where you play as Cyp, a cat selling plants from their plant van all over the world.

One of the biggest challenges Team Blueberry encountered was how to keep our art style consistent. Blueberry’s art team is pretty large, having 4 artists to 2 programmers, each with a unique art style, so we wanted to make sure everyone’s art looked cohesive. On top of that, each of our artists had different strengths, ranging from animation, to 3D modeling, to 2D illustration, and we wanted our game to make the most out of everyone’s area of expertise while also making room to pick up new skills.

We tackled this problem by drawing a couple iterations of our main character, Cyp. Then, we decided which version worked the best, fit the feel we intended, and was in a style that others could easily replicate. This image became our reference from there on so everyone could stay consistent and have a visual to look at when creating any assets for the game. We also went through similar processes for other game components like icons and game boards. After we had an art style set, we looked through all the assets we needed to create and decided what could be created in 2D and what could be 3D.

These early concepts and planning were essential for us. It has given all the members of Blueberry a solid idea of what the feel of our game is and how to create cohesive looking art assets. We’re over 7 weeks in and our unified vision of what we’d like our end product to look like has made the process go rather smoothly.

SIP has been a blast for Team Blueberry so far and ourselves and all the other teams are working hard to produce some awesome games this summer! I’ve learned so much from my fellow teammates and all the other SIP members and can’t wait to get even more out of it!