Mechanics in Motion

Once you have collected your reference material, you will need a way to organize it, or it’s going to be a nightmare trying to find what you want when you need it. Putting the images online into a wiki or ftp site is be a great idea— though you will need to scan the images from the printed material. This is probably what you will have to do if you are working on an indie project with multiple artists across the country (or world). However, you want more than just a catalogue of images. What you want is a something like an Art Bible, which is a collection of images, colors, moods and other visual reference for artists to use. This is the job of the art director, so if there is one on your team, you can assign it to them (or just work on it yourself).

Here are some things you might find in an Art Bible:

1. Reference Images
2. Mood Boards
3. Color Palette
4. Texture Archive
5. Concept Art

If your game is broken into levels (as it should be unless it is a very small game) you will likely have all of the above for each level. You will also have some of the above for both characters and environments. I say ‘some’, because you will want separate concept art for characters and environments, even though they may use the same color palette and/or mood boards. We have already talked about the reference images, so let’s look at the other items. (For a review of collecting reference images, read here: http://indiegamesguild.com/ravenborne/2010/02/11/the-concept-behind-concept-art-2/)

Mood Board

A mood board is a composite of your favorite reference images which really capture the feel of your game or level. It doesn’t have to make any logical sense, but it should be visually and emotionally consistent.  It’s a great thing for someone who doesn’t draw well to use, since it’s mostly compositing. You may need to get an artist to take a look at your mood board and help with a harmonious integration of elements, since your biggest mistake could be so many unrelated images that you don’t establish any consistent look and feel at all; having someone point out these inconsistencies will help you to really focus in on what you want. In fact, the process of creating a mood board is something of a micro process of the creation of game art assets. If you can’t narrow things down and create a consistent look early on with your mood board, it’s an indication that the project is headed for visual chaos.

Color Palette

A color palette is a selection of a few limited colors that will be used in your game. You will very likely have different ones for different levels, but for now just get one for your primarily level— the rest you can get to once you have been through this process the first time. Knowledge of color theory is very helpful here, but if you don’t know much about that, you can at least put your colors together and make sure they look right next to each other. (If we want to learn about here is a good reference: www.adobe.com/education/instruction/subject/pdfs/color_theory_curriculum.pdf). If you have no idea where to start, go back to your reference images and select a primary color that fits the level and work from there, picking colors that look good together and share a similar mood (many digital art programs have a color selection tool). The idea is to get five or six color-squares all sitting next to each other, and clarify the order of importance that you expect them to be used. They are not all going to be used equally in the game: certain ones will be primary and others will be used to accent the level.  Of course, this doesn’t mean that the level will only be limited to these few colors, as characters and the real world are filled will all sorts of bits of color— but everything in your level or game has to fit visually into this color scheme, and will surprisingly enough probably end up being some variation of the colors in your palette. I recommend you work with anyone you know who has a good artistic eye to help you with this palette, since this is a key step. Once you have the color palette worked out, everything else becomes a lot easier. You can build entire websites using the hexadecimal versions of these colors and be fairly confident that things are going to work out together.

Texture Archive

A texture archive is pretty straight forward, as it is just a collection of textures that will be used in your game.  However, textures all need to be made visually consistent based on your mood boards and color palette. This is one of the biggest problems with using modeling packs—different textures from different modelers, when combined together, are going to be all over the color spectrum, so you at least need to have someone color correct these textures to fit the other elements in your art bible. If you really want your game to have its own look, you will need some original textures (not just some photographs you have taken, or downloaded from a free texture site). This is an area where a lot of indie designers feel things are getting “fussy” and not worth spending the time on, but think about it for minute— textures are on everything, and in fact a collection of textures is all the player really sees— so what is the point of a mood board and color palette if the textures have not been created to match them?

Concept Art

Concept art is a luxury that not many indie designers have, so if you find one, great— they are gold. In fact, it’s not uncommon for most concept artists in small studios to be the art director. But the concept artist is going to want to see all of the visual aids you have collected anyway, as these will be the basis for the artwork. Hopefully though you can see that the ability to draw or paint well is only one small part of the bigger picture. If you can pull together all the other elements in the art bible, you will have a fighting chance of being able to get your modelers to come up with a look that you want.

Think back about the scenario I painted in this article: http://indiegamesguild.com/ravenborne/2010/02/10/finding-the-direction-in-indie-art-direction/. The first mistake was that language and not visual reference was used to communicate the ideas for the game.  Most of those odd questions would have been answered in the mood boards and reference images, and where they were not it would have been very easy for everyone to talk about specifics (“you want this Scottish castle archway or the German one modeled in the main keep?”) Having reference to work from, the artists who were flaky and not going to do any work would quickly be separated from the ones who were simply confused about what they were supposed to be doing. In fact, maybe you would discover that lacking visuals, the artists had gone off and done their own research and come up with images that were not all what you wanted—images that would have been screened out if the above stages had been followed.  And since there was no color palette, the artists naturally fell back on the colors they felt comfortable with, so you got a Scottish dark Gothic look right next to a bright sunny Caribbean environment. And of course red flags would have been raised on the artist who was really just trying to get a wild-west piece for his portfolio finished. Any one of these images could have been compared to the mood boards to see if it had the same visual consistency, or the reference images to see if the modeler had gone way off from the original image. All the images could be compared to the color palette to make sure they were using the correct ones.  It’s natural that in the isolation of a studio, when an artist gets into his creative ‘flow’, that he or she will begin to deviate into their own style or even fall back on familiar techniques. The Art Bible will keep everyone aligned and moving along on the same visual track.