Various Ideas

The first real art task was to create viable art styles for each of the three games we were prototyping. Breaking the task down, I decided to focus on two this week: The parkorror game- a first person platformer with scary monsters chasing you constantly- and the management sim- a strategy game in which you must run a police station. I started with the horror game.

Parkorror

Given the genre, I felt it would be a worthy endeavor to make the art in the game an homage to some of my favorite films. I wanted to capture the campy creepiness of black and white horror films and episodes of the Twilight Zone. 

I wouldn't be able to use the color ideas of my experiments, but the flat, simple style could still be applied. Things would have an air of realism with a slightly stylized twist, and I could still have some fun with the contrast between black and white, which in my opinion is responsible for the coolest imagery found in black and white films. Here are some example sketches and a collection of references I used for what an idea of the main character might look like.

The working setting was a scientists lab that the main character would be escaping from after undergoing experiments, leaving him with abilities that would make various gameplay situations possible.

Police Management

For the police management game, the focus would be very different- lots of menu and UI designing, with the possible 3D environments or backgrounds as mainly window dressing. My plan to continue with the flat, brightly saturated colors could continue, with a particular focus on red and blue: blue to represent police presence, and red to represent low police presence or danger. Once again, I took inspiration from Halil Ural, who uses a similar technique in his illustrations:

With this in mind, I set to work on some designs for the police units at different levels:

I had lots of fun with the idea of over-militarization. Would there be consequences to upgrading your units too far when not on missions? I don't think the civilian population would be too happy to see their neighborhood patrolman replaced with an armored car and a riot cop. It could definitely be a fun dynamic to play around with.

Finally, here are some examples of what unit cards might look like. It's a simple look, but it could easily be refined once it becomes clear what kind of information we would need to display for each unit.