Fistful of Duckies Style Guide

This is going to be a long post, but it has lots of pictures, so bear with me. 

Pre-production is coming to a close and parts of production are well underway now for my team's senior game, A Fistful of Duckies. Here are some of the pages from our style guide. 

We're targeting Android and iOS tablets to show off the art better than we could on a tiny phone screen.

Farm Blitz and Dragon Box were also two of the games that originally got me interested in the learning games and games for change space. Combining learning objectives with truly engaging game play is an ambitious challenge, and both games carried it off beautifully in their own way.

We want a combination of dark, creepy, and cute for our game. I absolutely love the color palette and chalk pastel texture of the Monsters Inc. concept art. Shaun Tan's monsters are adorable and weird, and Rayman Origins gave us a great solution for readability: smooth gradient cell shading on the characters, lush painted textures in the background.

Parker Pierce designed our carnival barker host. I wrote the character description and designed the color scheme.

My job as the Art Director is to make sure everything fits seamlessly into our world and supports the artistic vision for the game. These ground rules are a starting point to keep everything looking unified.

Our game has a limited palette to emulate the inherent restrictions of a single box of chalk pastels. By playing two divergent colors off each other instead of mixing a middle point, we'll be using optical mixing for extra vibrancy and texture.

Target objects will be lighter and stand off from the darker scenery and background pieces.

Amendment:
We've added Terrana Cliff as another Prop Designer & Concept Artist as of Jan. 2013, and Justin Jacox is now our sound designer.