The Making of Bowman

Spirit Siege has a booth at PAX! Time for eye-catching booth decorations. Caitlyn Patten designed the character, I just made her BIG. The game art, because it's game art, was too low res to print at this scale, so I broke out the old scenic painting skills and made us a prop. At first I was reluctant to get this crafty, but less than a day later I was bouncy with excitement and losing sleep gleefully planning methods and materials. Turned out to be a super fun diversion from the usual pixel-tinting.

Spirit Siege - Kickstarter Banners & Reward Sub-Banners

Lots of graphic design for Spirit Siege's Kickstarter page. The main section banners look like the princess example above. Each one features one of Caitlyn's adorable characters.

Below are some of the sub-banners for the Rewards section, where we go into detail about each reward item. I designed these sub-banners to be smaller, less attention-grabbing, and to feel indented, so that it would be clear that you are looking at a sub-section header even when you're deep inside the long long rewards section of page.

There are more examples on our Kickstarter page, but these are the ones where I created the icon art on the left. Caitlyn made the art on the others.

Tileable Water System

One of the tasks I worked on at Nova Heartbeat was designing a tileable water system for Spirit Siege, a top-down grid-based strategy game. We wanted to create organic-looking coastlines to generate visual interest while clearly delineating which spaces were playable. With some exceptions, units could not be placed on water. My rule of thumb was: water squares should be at least 75% covered by water, and grass squares should be no more than 25% covered by water.

While the original mock-up by Caitlyn had pretty directional wave lines, I wanted the final assets to be more flexible than that, so I used spirals to create a non-directional water texture instead.

Full Color Self-Portrait with Process

Last Friday, I gave myself the afternoon to start making whatever art I wanted. Since I hadn't done a full color portrait in a long while, and seeing how I'm still the cheapest and most accommodating model I know, self-portrait it was.

Happy Halloween!

So there I was, listening to Janelle Monáe ("Dance Apocalyptic," in case you were wondering. I know you were.), looking at pictures of red pandas, and vaguely wondering what to be for Halloween.

Here's what happened.

Hanging Lantern

Self-Portrait

Ancient City

I took inspiration from the Ajanta Caves in India and the Vardzia cave monastery in Georgia for this concept piece of an ancient city. 

Castle Paintovers

I love doing paintovers. They let me play with mood and color a lot sooner because so much of the content and composition is there already. 

 Overcast Day

Overcast Inspiration

Provided White Box Render, source unknown

Sunset Inspiration

Sunset

Paper Raptor

A friend made me a delightful origami raptor, so I painted it. 

The Lonely Giant

 Here are three illustrations from The Lonely Giant, a Scottish fairy tale. 

The giant asks his human friend how to cure his loneliness. Knowing that he could never marry her, she tells him to find a giantess to be his wife. 

He wanders the shoreline in search of a giantess. 

The giantess rejects the giant for being too small, and hurls him into the sea.  

Bat-winged Sharks! Run!

Cue "The Flight of the Valkyries."

A Snail Riding a Flying Platypus

A Fistful of Duckies Brochure

Outside

Doing some graphic design this week in preparation for DigiPen's Career Fair. Here's the team brochure for the game. A stack of our business cards will be paper-clipped inside over the whales. 

Inside 

Graveyard Concept Art

Concept art for the graveyard level of the Halloween theme. 

Franken-duckies & gravestones by Jon Gardner. Bats by Terrana Cliff. I did the rest of the painting and the final composition. 

The New and Improved Edge of the World!

Update to the Edge of the World level: new colors for sky and masking flats help distinguish it from the previous pirate-themed level, and background clouds add depth and interest. Woo!

Brown? We don't need no stinkin' brown!

Next up we're making a pumpkin patch level for the Halloween theme. I'm having fun interpreting earth tones with our limited vibrant color palette.

Drawings by Jon Gardner and Terrana Cliff. I did the painting. 

Robot Walk

Kraken Battle!

Level 3 (Act 3 of the pirate theme) features an underwater kraken battle! In support of our cut-out shooting gallery aesthetic, we decided not to aim for wave action on the tentacles and are treating them instead like flat pieces being controlled by sticks from below.

My team mate, Jon Gardner, did the initial character exploration. I then made final adjustments to the line drawings before taking over at the color exploration phase and carrying it through to final polish.

Thinking with Post-its

For A Fistful of Duckies, our team was doing a lot of talking about chains of events, which menus needed which buttons, when we should present information to the player, what calculations would need to happen when so that the game would play well and at least somewhat resemble the loan repayment process in real life. To make the conversation clearer for everyone, I got a bunch of post-its and made this flow-chart of how I imagined the game would go. Then our game designer, Anthony Murray, took over, made adjustments, and implemented it in accordance with how the game actually evolved. 

Return to Guache

Dusted off the guache tubes and made this little painting of a snake plant. Had a good time, remembered a lot of things, and learned a few more. 

Underwater Stage

Level 3 (act 3 of the pirate theme) is an underwater level, so I got to make a whole new stage complete with sand ground rows, water masking flats, and a god ray backdrop. 

The Edge of the World!

In Level 2 (act 2 of the pirate theme), our friend the pirate ship sails to the waterfall at the edge of the world. Sure, why not.

Choice Menu

Between rounds, the player interacts with the carnival barker host, learns new concepts, and makes strategic choices which determine how hard it will be to make future round payments. These choices are where the real life financial concepts really intersect with our carnival metaphor. 

The Happiest Whales!

Level 1 (Act 1 of the pirate theme) features a big blue whale. At the end of the level, a ship carrying barrels of ink crashes against a rock, dying the water rainbow colors. Then our whale returns to show off his snazzy new look. Jon Gardner did the line drawings. I did the paint and final polish. 

A Fistful of Duckies Title Screen

A Fistful of Duckies is a mobile carnival shooter being developed for Android and iOS tablets. The wide screen format (above) is the widest aspect ratio on the Android, and the cropped version (right) is how it looks on the iPad. The button leads to the main menu. This is the widest shot the player ever sees of the carnival setting since the rest of the game takes place within the stage space. I used the thumbnails (below) to work out value composition and color before moving on to the final piece.  

The Barker character was designed and drawn by our animator, Parker Pierce.

Targets

A Fistful of Duckies is - even under all its ambition to be a learning game about debt repayment - a gallery shooter. Couldn't have a shooting gallery without targets! Many of these are specific to the pirate theme (Levels 1-3), and some will be reused throughout. We're aiming for a flat cut-out aesthetic, so the targets will  move in XY space as if controlled by mechanical means - sticks, pulleys, ropes, etc. 

Hanging hat monster and jackalope drawn by Parker Pierce. Pirate duck drawn by Jon Gardner. I drew the rest and painted them all. 

Endangered Species

I'm exploring the idea of making a triptych of posters featuring three endangered species. Here are some of the drawings I did to familiarize myself with the animals. 

Pirate Set Pieces

Here is a collection of set pieces for the pirate-themed levels. 

Drawings by Jon Gardner. I did paint and final polish. 

Pirate Level Concept Art

Here's a stab at the target look & feel for the pirate levels. 

The "minimum-wage ducks" up front will always be available, but they are worth so few points that the game is not winnable unless the player also hits more difficult targets.  

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.