A key part of Game Design, having a solid pre-production phase will help you build your game quickly, and improve team coherency.
Pre-Production was something that I had unknowingly experienced many times before in my art career. While not entirely similar to that of the game design scene, the planning and research stage of an art project serves the same purpose as pre-production, forming a coherent idea and detailing limitations and goals for your project. The "sketching" phase of game design, this included idea generation, research, and a finalization of game direction and art style.
Idea Generation
We began the first day by brainstorming as a team. Everyone worked together to come up with around 16 ideas, after being assigned the theme of Isolation and Connection. From there, we narrowed down the list by playability, adherence to theme, scope, and general interest. We ended with three main ideas- A robot swarm puzzle game where you would command Pikmin-like robots to complete puzzles, a samurai narrative-based game about a Ronin and his search for honor, and a museum game where you worked alone in a dark museum, trying to stop robbers from stealing artifacts. We worked with the professors on the module to decide which of these had the most potential, and we really liked the mechanics behind the robot game, so we locked it in and began research.
Art Design Document
While a lot of making the Art Design Document was in the hand of the animation students due to the criteria, as one of the 3D artists I had a good deal of say in the art style and color palette for the game. We wanted to lean into a stylistic reduction, where it felt almost as if the player was controlling a toy. Inspirations like World of Warcraft's Gnomeregan and video games with strong usage of shape language.
Research
We did some research on how other games have used this art style, and once we were happy with a decently fleshed out Design Document, we began researching real-world equivalents of props and shapes that would fit into our theme. Two main areas of my research were that of organics, and factories. My organics research led me to look through different types of forests and jungles to find something that would work well for our scenes, and easily blend into the oxidized copper material we started with. We decided to lower the amount of foliage in the game, reducing it to moss and mushrooms, rather than being totally overgrown with ferns and flowers. After researching what kind of plants and materials we needed to make, we moved on to actually prototyping 3D models and drawing concept art. The props would change slightly over time as we developed the narrative of the story, but the for the most part stayed thematically consistent.
Concept Art and Prototyping
Concept Art was the final stage of pre-production and would be continually interspersed throughout project as the need for new props arose. Designs for characters were experimented with as a group before being handed over to the animation students, sound design was handled by our production manager, and the 3D artists began experimenting with textures and techniques to see which worked best for our project. Throughout the pre-production phase we got feedback from team members on concepts depending on what level designers needed.
More concept art can be found on the main Auto-Matons page of this site.
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