Art-ifacts: recap of our art-direction

Since our current art has been stable for quite some time, a blog post about the art direction is long overdue. Let me take you a few weeks back in time, when all these decisions were made.
(As a fair warning, this is a long picture heavy post.)

First decision - an art style.

Before you get in the nitty gritty aspects of sketching and painting, we had to settle on the type of sprites our game would use.  This art-style would dictate both the tools, as well as the overall look of the game. Quite important I would say.
Most current casual games that involve characters and are not abstract like pianotiles or dots, either have a cartoony, or a pixel look to them.  We decided to go with a cartoony look as well, slightly inspired by games like angry birds. Though we did not evaluate this decision, we felt that having a cartoony style would appeal to the general public.

The first drawing - Menu background.

The first drawing that was produced, was the menu background. This allowed us to get a rough feeling for the colours, and shading we wanted to use. The drawing itself was inspired by the sketch on the paper prototype menu.

We were not content with our first iteration.

Thus we redid it, which led to the picture currently in use.

Here are some additional images to show a bit of the workflow.

 

Dino-time - The development of the dinosaurs.

With a general idea of the colours and art style it was time to move to the dinosurs.

A proper design of the dinosaurs is really important. Not only do they have to look good, they have to be readable as well, especially when they quickly move over your screen.
In order to make the dinos look slightly related, we established some rough rules about the design. The smallest one had to look edible and cute, while the big one had to look intimidating. We achieved this by relatively growing the legs/belly/jaw of the dinos more, the bigger they are.

Chicklet Dino.

Lets start with the smallest dino, and work or way up! 

The main requirement of the small dino was that it had to look cute, and edible. We drew inspiration from the chickens you can buy at the local supermarket. 

The following sketches were made to determine a good look for it:

The last picture was cleaned up and coloured blue.

 

The blue colour was chosen because it did not blend with the background, and green and orange were already taken.

TopHat! - our protoganist.

Initially, the only real requirement was that our protoganist had a tophat. A totally valid request, that guided the our design decisions, aesthetic wise. 

                                                                                                                     
The last image again was brought into a drawing program, cleaned up and coloured.

                                                                                                                                                                   

Baddie - The big evil dino.

Last, but not least, our evil bad guy. He had to look threatening and big, like he ate a lot of smaller dinos. With this in mind the following sketches were made.

Using the same workflow as for the other two dinos, the last one was cleaned up, and colored red/orange.

We choose this colour, as it is quite universally associated with danger, which made it a good choice for our bad guy.

We ended up with three quite distinctly shaped dinosaurs, that were usable in our game.

The aesthetic future.

Unfortunately due to time constraints, priorities have shifted away from the artsy-side of the project. But if we do find time to improve it, this is a small list of things we still like to change.

• Animations! probably unfeasible as it would require a lot more drawings (a simple walk cycle loop on average is around 30 frames, for 3 dinosaurs, would constitute to 90 sketches).
• Improvement of the lanes and in-game background. 
• More different looks for dinosaurs, and possible more random objects, like boulders for example. 
• Particle effects.