Our art used to be so bad, that when I first sent my programmer this screenshot...
...believe it or not, he said, "That's for our game? Wow, that looks nice!"
Over the years we've had to update our game's art 4 times. Some areas took more iterations than others, but here is one example of how the background art progressed over the past 3 years.
Art 1 - Wireframes
I was originally raised in UX Design, so to communicate my ideas to artists (and the whole team, really) I created wireframes.
Art 2 - Temp Assets
We used temporary assets from other games, as well as my own incredible ability to color in rectangles, to create an area that looked decent enough for a playtester to go through. Game design is often best done as an iterative process, so the faster we could get a quick 'n' dirty prototype out, the sooner we could start improving on all of our designs.
Bonus points for you if you know where some of these assets are from
Art 3 - Orissa Jenkins
We've hired over 8 artists over the course of development, but Orissa was one of the few that worked on this area specifically. I personally made a lot of mistakes and had a lot to learn- where to look for artists, what to look FOR, how to communicate my ideas to them, the formatting and layering of each asset, etc. Orissa is a fantastic artist (as you can see on her website), and neither my mistakes nor the way Steam imports images shows off her true skill. However, in the end we went with another team.
Click on any of these images for a higher-res version.
Art 4 - Adorabelle & Cindy
If you've read our "About the Team" post, Adorabelle & Cindy are a team of artists that work together under the moniker "Wanderfaire". They're incredibly versatile, and I knew I could rely on them because we had worked together before on another game project, where they created a gorgeous-looking world map for a tactical RPG.
The world map for project Super Planet Darkness. Hopefully I'll get a chance to finish this game one day.
Not only were they just absurdly skilled artists- but the way they communicated their thoughts, goals, and processes helped me improve in those areas as well. And so, to cut a long story short, they were amazing, I got better, and they produced some of the prettiest backgrounds for our game- even better than I ever could have hoped for.
The automatic doors slide open. It's sick.
That's all for today. We'll be posting more about other screens, character art design, 'dungeon' design, puzzles, story, you name it. So stay tuned, and thanks for reading!
- Dave