Visual Style guide

keir150

Hei,

I’m currently working on an isometric RTS game with a team of 6, I’m the character artist… having trouble working with the lead artist, we need to establish a visual style guide for the game, i was just wanting to ask you guys if you could give any recommendations to where we could start on establishing this.

Helpful topics might be;

Examples of successful (badass) style guide.
Recommendations on how we can collaborate on putting one together.
How we can use the visual style guide to create consistent art.
General guidelines of what should be contained in the style guide.

Thank you, Keir.

glynnsmith

For the couple of projects I've been in charge of collecting up and organising a style guide, it's really just a matter of doing it - getting reference material collected, sorting out what you want to use, and then firing that off to your concept artist (or using it as straight up reference for your scenes).

1. Set yourself a theme. Get one or two like-minded team members to throw reference images into a shared dropbox folder that'll go towards style, mood, architecture & design that you feel best represents what your final visual goal is.

2. Sort through it, organise it into what part of a scene/prop/map/character it'll be referenced for.

3. Sit down with your concept artist, and make clear which bits should be referenced for what use it'll have in the game.

The goal is to clearly communicate what you anticipate your game to look and feel like, to make it easier for your artists to create the art for it. Just keep that in mind when you're preparing it and you should be golden.