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.

Barker Color

Parker Pierce, our animator, has been working on the character design of the carnival barker host. My job was to design his colors so he'd fit nicely in our painted world. The barker will be animated in Flash with vector gradients, and everything else in the game is painted in Photoshop. 

The final color choices we taken from the same limited palette as the rest of the game. I included call-outs of which colors made up the gradients to make it easier for Parker, our animator, to replicate the look in Flash. 

Our character was looking pretty generic up until we decided to play homage to a beloved former professor by incorporating iconic features and personality traits into the design. Round two of color thumbnails reflects those updates. 

Here's the very first stab at color for the barker. In the final game, the character will be standing in front of the booth and the player will only be able to see from the waist up. We know he'll be against a fairly dark curtain, but we aren't married to green yet. 

Study of a Rose

I was having a pretty crummy day, so I made something to improve it. I don't often have roses in the house, so I took advantage of the opportunity.

Self-Portrait

I'm quite happy with how this self-portrait came out. I chose 3 colors - a magenta, a cyan, and a yellow - for my palette and did all the mixing with opacity and a couple of different blending modes on the brush. 

Sketching in Portland

 

Study of a Pansy

I was inspired by all the awesome drawings the students did today in the class I'm a Teaching Assistant for, so I came home and drew this pansy. It felt good to dust off the old colored pencil collection.

Hadiyah Color Turn-Around

Color!

The 3rd person camera will be looking at her back most of the time in-game, so I did color comps from a rear view. I also figured that since the camera is above her, she'll most likely be set against a tan stone floor color.

The battleship-style label grid is so that my teammates and I can communicate quickly and clearly about the different options over our online forum while we get only limited face time during summer semester.  

Thrones

Here is some early exploration for the thrones. Not only do they need to read as wind-god thrones, but I also want them to help tell the story of the two brothers. My current favorite is the one on the left because the heights show which brother is older and more dominant, the flags indicate wind, the broken leg hints at the little brother's downfall, and it is such a big brother thing to steal all the throw pillows. 

Temple Arena

Basic "How to Play" instructions and overview of current high-level game design:

The whole game takes place in the Temple of the Wind Gods high up in a tower in the middle of a desert. The main sanctuary is acting as our arena. Here are some early ideas about the space:

Rough Concept Illustration

This is a moment from our game when Hadiyah, the blacksmith warrior woman, takes on a wave of lizard minion enemies. We now have a much clearer idea of the characters. My teammate, Parker Pierce, has been working on the lizard minion designs. 

Hadiyah 1st Rough Turn-Around

Hadiyah Refinement

Getting closer to a final rough character design. I took my team's feedback and mix-and-matched our favorite pieces. 

Contrast: Earth v. Wind

While working on the character development, I really wanted a more clear-cut way of visually distinguishing the good guys from the bad, so I made the following handy chart for myself and my team.

Bladed or Blunt?

Can't design a warrior without her weapon. I've been exploring the options: battle ax? mace? war hammer? We've even toyed with the idea that she made herself a weapon out of an old anvil. The anvil-hammer is probably too humorous for the tone of this game, but it was fun to try out none the less. 

The Other Guys

Early exploration for our secondary characters:

Aidan is the son of the protagonist, Hadiyah. and the God of the West Wind. He's an overconfident teenager who aspires to be a hero but gets himself in trouble. In our story, he's been kidnapped and is being held captive by his uncle, Ilimatar, the God of the East Wind. 

Aidan wears many of the same colors and material types as his pragmatic mother, but has far less sense about the difference between functional protective armor and suggestive fashion. His clothes are worn and disheveled from the fight when we was captured. 

Iliamatar has kidnapped Aidan as bait to lure Hadiyah into his temple full of vicious lizard minions. He wants to kill them both as vengeance for the death of his brother, Demetrious.

His clothes are very showy and made of light flowing materials.

Hadiyah Character Exploration

We've been working on our story, character relationships, and visual exploration simultaneously. 

I've been doing the visual development, starting with silhouette, stance, and general body build. We knew we wanted her to read as strong and capable, so I'm leaning toward a stockier build and heavier weapons. She's almost certainly a melee fighter.

Warrior Woman Beat Boards - Color

More moments, now in color:

Top: Instead of starting in the arena, the heroine first has to fight her way up an open staircase to get to the main temple.

Middle: Inside the temple, the god is lounging on his throne. Our villain, the God of the East Wind, used to share this temple with his little brother, the God of the West Wind, until the brother fell in love with the heroine, gave up his immortality to father the (now captive) son, and died. The design of the thrones, through their heights, forms, and relative states of disrepair, will help tell that story visually.

Bottom: Villain watches heroine fight extra-large lizard minion from the safety of his throne.

Warrior Woman Beat Boards

First thoughts on some moments from the game:

Top: Introduction. Mom enters arena prepared to challenge the god to rescue her captive son.

Middle: God watches from on high as his minions are released into the arena to destroy the protagonist.

Bottom: Having defeated all the minion creatures, the heroine fights the god herself in a final boss battle.

Warrior Woman Game!

Started pre-production on a new game with a new team. We knew we wanted a story with a strong female protagonist set in a lush fantasy world. 

The game features a young male aspiring hero, Aidan, who got himself in over his head and is being held captive. You play as his strong middle-aged mother, a total bad-ass blacksmith named Hadiyah, to defeat the god-villain and rescue your son.  

First and foremost, our heroine will be reasonably dressed - no battle bikinis here. Secondly, I was drawn to a warm color palette, which suggested a hot arid environment. 

Goes Around - Beauty Shot

Here is a still from one of my favorite moments in the film. 

Goes Around - Final Film

Here it is! The final film.

My goal with this piece was to tell a story in which an environment prop, the carousel, was the protagonist, and to pit it against a human antagonist. I always thought of the carousel as the hero, and I wanted it to display a two-sided personality; cute and harmless at the beginning and end, yet forceful and strong when the need arose.

My secondary goal was to translate a 2D cartoony feel into 3D without losing the stylized charm.

Tashi & Hom Graphic Novel

Tashi & Hom is a game featuring a young boy, Tashi, and his companion blob, Hom, magically hacking and slashing their way through waves of delightful, adorable, and voracious enemies.

In addition to working on the game, I also made a graphic novel version of the main characters' backstory based on the established game mythos. The graphic novel isn't technically canon anymore, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

Character design for Tashi & Hom by Tyler Stuart. World and premise was a collective effort by Papertooth Games. I authored and created the graphic novel by fleshing out story details, writing the script, designing secondary characters, creating page layouts, and producing the final art. 

Bonbon Voyage - Title Illustration

Quick & dirty illustration for the title menu. As you may have noticed, many of these elements are embellished versions of the orthographic concept art made earlier in the process. We needed something fast, and this was a reasonable solution which still conveyed the essential character of our game. Buttons along the bottom (over the grass) let the player begin a new game, read a tutorial, see the credits, and exit. 

The character was designed and drawn by our character artist, Jacqui Sessa.

Tashi & Hom Game Menus

Pause menu, confirmation menu, lose screen, and win screen from Tashi & Hom, a hack-and-slash action game about a little boy and his magical companion fighting their way through waves of delightful enemies in stylized Bhutanese-inspired temples.

Ctrl P Print

This was an exercise in conveying sound effects and intonation in a purely visual medium. If you haven't already seen Eddie Izzard's "Glorious," it is definitely worth the watch.