Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Art Blog - Let's Talk About Process

I wanted to outline a little of the process making environments for FIST CHAMPION. I hope you'll indulge me.

I started off with my design document where I came up with Characters and environments. At first there was just a random collection of both, but then as the project developed it was decided that for every character there should be an associated level. Since I had wanted to use a valkyrie: Valhalla was an obvious location.

A quick sketch.
After a series of thumbs, I had wanted to do some larger sketches to help nail down what the environments would look like; as shown in a previous blog post. Some of the sketches were better than others. Valhalla was one of the weaker ones.

After it was decided to keep the sketched out look for the game, it became important for me to revisit the environment sketches to have a cleaner Valhalla to work with.

A much longer sketch. Scanned and cropped.
This was the resulting sketch. I had also taken the time to do a little more research on depictions of Valhalla, and had fallen in love with a simple geometric depiction of the structures. This was instead of a more Olympian approach with columns and domes everywhere.

Shadows and color swatches.
 After scanning the above sketch; it is brought into photoshop where I do a quick shadow pass and give everything a colored layer. It doesn't matter if the color is correct or not, because I can go back and adjust color and saturation after everything is blocked in.

Color adjustments, lighting, and textures.
With Valhalla, I wanted to push the rainbow aesthetic. So I might've gone a little overboard. Colors are adjusted, and texture is added along with some lighting effects. This was a pretty quick pass on the environment, I did it for use on the blog, but I feel like the core concepts are all present.

All environments are being brought to this level of completion for the next release of the game. Afterward, I plan to go over all environments again for another layer of polish. FIST CHAMPION inches ever closer to its next release.

In the meantime: here's a video I made of the announcer voice in game. (Now you can tell when rounds are happening. It's kind of a big deal.)



See you next week!

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