Art Revamp

August 19th, 2016

Learning the art style of a new project is an interesting phenomenon. With some of my simpler games it’s been a pretty straightforward process; I just pick my influences, do a couple tests and within a week I know pretty well what the game is going to look like. With Empires of Arkeia and Scrap Metal Heroes things were a bit more involved than that. Still, nothing thus far has compared to the lengthy art iteration I’ve gone through on Iron Tides. Looking back now at our early screenshots I have to question whether I had any idea of what I was doing. To be fair, environment art has always been a weakness of mine, and perhaps I was in too much of a rush to chase the first experiment that sort of worked. Finally working in a full-screen, 3D engine blinded me a bit too. Seeing all those physics interactions and animations happening in 3D space was so novel that I wasn’t aware of the visual design weaknesses that now seem painfully obvious.

But I am learning, and the stuff I’m producing now is pretty damn decent. I’m actually hoping that I don’t have yet another art epiphany a few months from now. We do get a lot better with every iteration, but I just don’t think we could afford another redo of all the art.

There’s been a similar phenomenon happening on the design side, but I’ll write about that later. Suffice it to say we’ve gone through at least five versions of our combat system, and only days ago I came up with yet another set of revisions that in my mind at least improve things a great deal. I’ll have to see how they work out in practice, but I am quite excited.

Some new title screen art to gander at:

build58_screen1_sm

– Peace and perilous voyages

 

Posted in Iron Tides, Project Previews | Comments Off on Art Revamp

Comments

Comments are closed.