Flat shaded art style for first person rpg
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I've posted about this in a couple of other places, thought I'd do a similar post here given all the artists here.
So I'm struggling with the art style for our game. We are a very experienced tiny team that is very tech heavy atm, the game is in the mmo genre.
I really want to make a flat shaded/stylized look work. But find a way to blend in what might seem like conflicting styles. We think we know this market fairly well, and we have some concerns about flat shaded and being able to make it immersive enough. I fully understand that generally immersion is not just about art style, but for character driven mmo's, it's a huge part in my experience.
The general idea is to use flat shaded for terrain and a more stylized unfaceted look for characters. Now for flat shaded we have done a few iterations on what looks best, and we came up with something that is kind of a hybrid. We started with a delaunay triangulated mesh without any shared vertices, but we texture it using a global texture map. So it has a much softer look and color blending while still having hard edges.
Our overall strategy for terrain is functional first, it's a bunch of islands of various sizes and shapes in a large mostly water world. We create terrains by starting with a bunch of mesh building blocks and place them on a base mesh using a point system to get the right combination of features. All of the feature have strategic gameplay value. A mountain range with a nested valley with an easily defensible entrance for example. And then we can take that same valley building block and procedurally place it changing up things like overall height and such. Now all of this is far easier with the hard edged terrains. Far less detail, sculpting is pretty easy, it looks good even if everything isn't just perfect.
If we go with a traditional terrain, it just increases the cost so much.
Characters I just can't see hard edged style working, I think we would lose too much of our target audience.
So the question is for experienced artists, if you were presented this task do you think you could pull it off? We kind of have to start making concrete decisions on this, our functionality is getting too far ahead of art and it's actually preventing us from showing anything, having a dev blog, etc.. First impressions just count too much to go out too early in this area.
So I'm struggling with the art style for our game. We are a very experienced tiny team that is very tech heavy atm, the game is in the mmo genre.
I really want to make a flat shaded/stylized look work. But find a way to blend in what might seem like conflicting styles. We think we know this market fairly well, and we have some concerns about flat shaded and being able to make it immersive enough. I fully understand that generally immersion is not just about art style, but for character driven mmo's, it's a huge part in my experience.
The general idea is to use flat shaded for terrain and a more stylized unfaceted look for characters. Now for flat shaded we have done a few iterations on what looks best, and we came up with something that is kind of a hybrid. We started with a delaunay triangulated mesh without any shared vertices, but we texture it using a global texture map. So it has a much softer look and color blending while still having hard edges.
Our overall strategy for terrain is functional first, it's a bunch of islands of various sizes and shapes in a large mostly water world. We create terrains by starting with a bunch of mesh building blocks and place them on a base mesh using a point system to get the right combination of features. All of the feature have strategic gameplay value. A mountain range with a nested valley with an easily defensible entrance for example. And then we can take that same valley building block and procedurally place it changing up things like overall height and such. Now all of this is far easier with the hard edged terrains. Far less detail, sculpting is pretty easy, it looks good even if everything isn't just perfect.
If we go with a traditional terrain, it just increases the cost so much.
Characters I just can't see hard edged style working, I think we would lose too much of our target audience.
So the question is for experienced artists, if you were presented this task do you think you could pull it off? We kind of have to start making concrete decisions on this, our functionality is getting too far ahead of art and it's actually preventing us from showing anything, having a dev blog, etc.. First impressions just count too much to go out too early in this area.
Replies
What I'm after is a bit higher level. This type of terrain is inherently less costly to produce then a typical terrain, so the question is can you take any variation of this really and make it work with say softer stylized character models that people can relate to better then if they also used a faceted look.