Blending good art and games

Upskill, upskill, upskill.

Over the last couple of days I've been focused heavily on the design aspect of games rather than the technical side.

Luckily, I've already got a good amount of experience with Illustrator and Photoshop so making the opening scene for one of my up and coming games, seemed like a good place to start.

However, straight away I found that it was quite difficult to conceptualise a 3d game in a 2d space, especially when you don't want to spend weeks on it. I decided to go simple and basic for the first one. So here it is:

Thanks to games like Pinstripe, this style as become a lot more acceptable nowadays

The Last Tree - A concept piece about the last tree on earth.

The drawing itself wasn't the most important thing to me, I'm no Picasso and don't claim to be, so its rough sketches for now. However, I made a point of using a good colour palette to give off a dark mood. There was also a heavy use of Gaussian and motion blurs to even out the rough edges.

When I went to emboss parts of the image to give it depth I ended up adding a very heavy drop shadow by accident... I loved it and the way it stylise the image to make it almost cartoon-like is really pleasant.

Even though the game is set in a very dark and foreboding future, I didn't just want to use greys, browns and blues. By choosing a bright contrasting colour, in this case Orange, it helped to highlight the player, the tree, as well as making UI elements (bottom left) stand out and draw focus.

I might continue to make these in this type of style for the time being. It's bright, colourful (regardless of the dark palette) and I found it fun to create the composition. Plus it gives me a good amount of practice in both Illustrator and Photoshop. However, as The Last Tree is a 3d game, I might have to rethink how I show this in these programs (perspective drawing makes me sweat).

As I've been learning Unity 3D it also made sense to do a bit of modelling in Blender as well. This means that later on I can model my own characters, environments and other assets without having to rely on the Unity assets store. As much as I love the amount of resources available, anyone who actually makes games will instantly recognise most of the assets from the store straight away.

Of course the first thing I had to try was a tree. Nothing square and easily shaped here!

Is this the Last Tree in question?... probably not

I did end up going for a low-poly look rather than full on realism, but I feel it came out really well. The shape of the tree itself looks fairly realistic while keeping a stylised effect.

Building the trunk was surprisingly easy, but I found that I struggled a bit with materials and selecting the correct vertices. I was told that using Blender without a Numpad can make things difficult, I didn't believe it before but I definitely do now! There are so many shortcuts you can use that are actually simpler than trying to find the one action you need out of thousands in the UI. A good combination of E, S an G shortcuts make this task both enjoyable and pretty quick.

Then next thing I would like to do with blender is learn a bit more about lighting. The correct use of lighting can make a bit of rubbish looking model (What? I'm not an artist!) look amazing and change the whole character of a game.

Hopefully with Grapple Dash being updated soon, we've had some issues with the code lately, it will give me a good opportunity to make some more, slightly easier, models. Perhaps a skyscraper or two, a crane, or even the grapple gun itself might be a next project to work on.

Keep on growing!