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Hello reader,

during the last few days I did some visual development for the game, before pushing the prototype further. I wanted to create concepts for the first village of the game.

The first steps were to research.

But research did not mean only look for the setting I chose, research meant to understand forms, shape and design language, understand culture and everyday life of the mesoamericans.
But it also meant to learn how to improve the visual design for the game. I was not totally happy with the style I achieved before, so I had a look at different painters. I especially fell in love with Van Gogh. To understand the techniques and designs of those painters, I took their pieces and removed color to see the pure values, then I removed the values to see the pure color. What really surprised me is how few colors they actually used in very vivid and colorful images. They precisely placed tones and values where they needed them and had a clear and readable composition.

As my brain got so full, it almost popped, and my energy level got lower, because research can be very tough, I decided to stop, process the new information and continue with the story and visual design.

I will tell more about the story in a future post, as it becomes more and more structured.

For the visual design, the process was to first sketch out a variety of silhouettes. I lightened the silhouettes and sketched over them to have thumbnails for a variety of buildings.

Afterwards, I chose the best looking ones and colored them by painting a base color underneath the sketches, then tinted that base in different hues. Then I added some volume by adding values and hue shifts. In some cases I painted on top of the sketch to increase some details.

The last step will be to arrange them to a village, make it readable and the purpose of each house understandable. Therefore I will probably paint a concept for it in Photoshop, color it and as soon as I am confident about the arrangement, I will draw the game graphics to build the level in Unity.

For other environments, inspiration and style exploration I also painted some test concepts.

In these concepts, I explore color composition. To see which colors work well with each other and in which context. Some are a bit over the top, but I wanted to explore the possibilities and styles.

If you have some favorite designs, or ideas I have not explored yet or some suggestions, please let me know in the comments or send a mail to:
maxheyderart@gmail.com

I am looking forward to hearing your feedback and opinions on the direction of the game.

Thanks so much for the interest!

All the best,

Max