Getting A Consistent Look

    Early last week I wrote about our team's process for deciding on an art style for The Grind. In that blog I mentioned the transition from research to concept art. This transition did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. With this project being done in an educational environment we had a very short amount of time to spend in the concept phase. Due to this we knew we had to crank out concepts at a rapid pace and would have to utilize the entire Art Team.
     I produced the first pieces of concept work: one environment concept, and one character concept. The rest of the Art Team would then try to replicate my style for future concepts. The Art Team consisted of five people all of which had varying skill levels with drawing. So unsurprisingly the concepts being produced were far from identical, and not the most cohesive. While not completely cohesive the character concepts fit together fairly well. All of the characters had the exaggerated proportions but some were much more stylized than others. But overall it felt that with slight modification the characters could easily belong in the same world.
     The environment concepts however were all over the place. There were very few consistent elements in the environment pieces. A lot of this was due to the fact that we were drawing concepts for multiple worlds at the same time. Something that in hindsight was very foolish. One week done in the conceptual phase and we had the same questions still in front of us. The only element we had truly ironed out was with the character designs. In the end it was our project manager who finally presented me with an answer to the environment issue. Due to time constraints for this project we decided to temporarily cut the multiple worlds instead focusing on one (The subject of my last blog). With this oddly depressing yet reassuring piece of news we set out to establish the look of this lone world. At this point we also split the team up so we weren't all working on concepts. Some began assisting the programmers with creating prototype assets for the core playable, while the rest stayed on concepts. In the coming weeks this topic will resurface and once we have more finished concepts I will do a postmortem on the subject of how we finally got that desired cohesion. Until then I have concept art to do (among other things)!

-James