Art from my upcoming Steam/iPad game Dungeon Hearts
polycounter lvl 17
I haven't posted on polycount in many years (probably not since participating in the first Dominance War), but it's provided me with tons of inspiration. I'm not nearly as talented an artist as most of the posters here, but maybe some of you will find it interesting.
Background: Dungeon Hearts is a fast-paced JRPG/Puzzle hybrid that I've been doing the art/design/programming on for over a year now. You can check out the latest gameplay trailer here. It's being published by Devolver Digital, and will be coming to Steam and iPads on March 28th.
Art Style: The game has 40 enemies (about half are palette swaps), 4 hero characters, 10 environments, and a variety of particle FX. Since I was creating the content as I was doing the rest of the stuff for the game, I had to keep to a simple style so I could produce the content on a realistic time-table. Low poly count, 2-3 color palettes for each character, simple silhouettes and keeping the detail to a minimum. This way I was able to pump out 1 environment or 2-3 characters each week (in between a full time job, wife, and newborn).
Heroes:
Enemies:
Environments:
Some of these shots are pretty old so the layout of things have changed a bit (as you can see in the trailer).
If you've made it this far, I've got something special for you! The game features 5 unique soundtracks, each in a different musical style. You start with just one unlocked, but you get a new one each time you beat the game. I'm giving out a Best Of compilation of the soundtrack, which you can download here.
Feel free to like the Dungeon Hearts fan page. Thanks for checking this out, let me know if you have any questions or comments!
Background: Dungeon Hearts is a fast-paced JRPG/Puzzle hybrid that I've been doing the art/design/programming on for over a year now. You can check out the latest gameplay trailer here. It's being published by Devolver Digital, and will be coming to Steam and iPads on March 28th.
Art Style: The game has 40 enemies (about half are palette swaps), 4 hero characters, 10 environments, and a variety of particle FX. Since I was creating the content as I was doing the rest of the stuff for the game, I had to keep to a simple style so I could produce the content on a realistic time-table. Low poly count, 2-3 color palettes for each character, simple silhouettes and keeping the detail to a minimum. This way I was able to pump out 1 environment or 2-3 characters each week (in between a full time job, wife, and newborn).
Heroes:
Enemies:
Environments:
Some of these shots are pretty old so the layout of things have changed a bit (as you can see in the trailer).
If you've made it this far, I've got something special for you! The game features 5 unique soundtracks, each in a different musical style. You start with just one unlocked, but you get a new one each time you beat the game. I'm giving out a Best Of compilation of the soundtrack, which you can download here.
Feel free to like the Dungeon Hearts fan page. Thanks for checking this out, let me know if you have any questions or comments!
Replies
Very cool of you to show us your work here on PC. I've got tons more questions though.
What kind of poly counts and texture sizes did you face? I'd love to see wire-frames. How did you manage to balance all three, design art and programming!? Have you considered a more behind the scenes article?
I'd love to pick your brain more but I'll leave it at that for now. Great job and super excited for the iPad version.
The characters and the enemies are all really good, nice variety, visually interesting.
I'm not a fan of the backgrounds. They seem a bit dull. I am willing to put this down to the fact that any sort of details would be lost/get in the way as everything else is already so colourful.
Overall, really nice artwork.
The characters and enemies are mostly in the 1000-1500 triangle range. I'll do a more in-depth behind the scenes at some point, but since the game ships soon all my free time is spent getting as much polish/bug fixing in as I can. Here are some wireframes I had lying around:
I've bult up a good system for handling all the different aspects of development over time. It includes:
-Set a desired ship date right away, so that all decisions can be measured against that. This helps stay on course, and determine the scope of the game, number of assets, etc that can be created. When you start out you'll be terrible at estimating how long various systems will take to create/implement/test, but you'll get better over time.
-Always keep a task list on hand. I usually have a list of large nebulous tasks that are waiting to be broken down in to smaller chunks, and a list of more specific action-items. At the beginning of each week I choose as many items from the latter list as I think I can complete over the week (plus a couple more just to be sure). If I finish the list early I'll either make another list for the rest of the week or relax a bit if there aren't any deadlines looming.
-Become comfortable with cutting content (killing your babies, it's often called). I had originally planned to have many more environments/enemies in the game, but I cut a good portion of it so that I could spend more time making the rest of it shine. Cutting can be painful at the time you're doing it, but it almost always results in a better product.
-Accept that you're not going to have a social life ;P
I mostly agree with you about the environments, although they look better in-game than in screenshots because there are things moving around in each of them. I think they ended up they way they did for the following reasons:
-Time: As far as art content, they were the most time consuming. I had originally wanted 18 in the final game, but ended up cutting it down to 10.
-Technical reasons: The environments are all rendered down to a series of planes for the purpose of parallax scrolling. To be more specific they are rendered to planes mapped to rotating cylinders to get the slightly bowed effect you can see in the videos. This of course limits just how much you can do perspective wise, or how the various layers interact with one another.
-Gameplay: They couldn't take too much focus away from the gameplay. I'm also a gameplay-first type of designer, so since they don't contribute directly to the gameplay systems the player interacts with, they were lower on the priority list. Not to say that they aren't important of course, since immersion is important, but as an indie you have to create a clear stratification of priorities based on what is important to you and stick to it.
Thanks for the comments, feel free to ask more questions if you want to know more about anything in particular!