Concept Art

My first independent task on the game project was to start creating concept art, for the modelers and texture artists. I mainly focused upon sketching out ideas for foliage and plants as I thought it would be a fun challenge to make them look stylised and colourful, and reflect the style of our game.

The image below shows various concepts I have created for the foliage, although not all of them will be used in the game, it still generates ideas for the modelers and texture artists when creating their assets. I attempted to make a lot of my work look slightly exaggerated, while not going over the top. Stylised assets in games commonly have a theme of taking realistic items and exaggerating them in ways such as; adding curves to otherwise straight edges, using saturated colours, or making items taller or smaller than they should be.

I have demonstrated this kind of style in some of the trees by including lots of curves, which would otherwise seem unnatural in nature, and by exaggerating the sizes of the leaves on the palm trees by making them droop down. I have attempted to reflect the low-poly style of our assets by creating sketches which also look very 'blocky', this can be shown in a lot of the plant sketches, alongside the 'chunky' ridges of the palm trees.

I ensured to include a few different exotic plants in my concepts; these would add colour and a variety of shapes into the scene, considering that a lot of the foliage will be made up of various green hues, this is important.

I intended to reflect both the pirate and tribal themes of the map by including foliage and assets from both sides, including palm trees, driftwood, and rocks for the pirates side of the map, and jungle flowers and tropical plants for the tribal side.

So far I'm very happy with the concepts I've created, I think that I have managed to capture the style that we are going for with our project by looking at games with similar art styles and taking inspiration from them. I ensured throughout this stage to keep in mind the audience demographic that we were trying to target with our game.