Hi, I’m Gareth the Creative Art Director at Coatsink. Let me tell you a little about the art of Astronimo.
The main goal for the art was to invoke the feeling of play and fun. Inspiration came from the classic Nintendo power magazines, the chunky play-mobile toys that I played with as a kiddy mixed together with designer vinyl toys and modern day Nintendo games such as the remake of Link's Awakening. We didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously as with the nature of the build it yourself gameplay and the insane ability to zoom in and out almost limitlessly gave us some fun restrictions to play within
Early Concept Art
The style wasn’t instantaneous though, as with many projects the art tends to develop with the mechanics and calculating how best art can serve the gameplay as well as hitting a high standard within project deadlines. Our initial aims were to create a beautiful organic run down sci-fi world with gnarly machinery and monsters but as the game progressed it became obvious that we wouldn’t have the time to perfect this and it didn’t tie in with the mechanics and took us away from this ‘toy’ universe that we were trying to create.
Early in engine tests
As you can see in the early in engine tests above we attempted more traditional & more realistic game art with the detailed normal maps etc caused a lot of noise and fought with the clean designer toy aesthetic.
Developed concept models
Above are examples of how we tried to simplify things to achieve that you feel, stripping things back to if they were to be made out of plastic. Materials change with form changes and are built into the model rather than relying on material maps. We also reduced the amount of details and again concentrated on what the main details that we needed to convey the asset we were creating.
Early grinder vs new grinder
Early driving seats vs new driving seats
Escape pod concept
Once we had established a baseline for the environments we then revisited the equipment left behind by the Hypergiant fleet. It all felt quite disconnected and so unifying the colour scheme and the design aesthetic was the main priority. We again stripped back some of the details but kept the rounded shapes as well as adding more realistic joints and mechanisms around moving parts. The colour scheme came from looking at NASA and trying to grasp that feeling as it is something that the audience could relate too. After I had established rules for myself on the design principles for the machinery it was easy to create a lot of ideas quickly. My favourite of these being the escape pods with the chewing gum-esque interiors.
Original Character concepts vs updated
The vehicle components and characters went through a similar development with the initial designs being upgraded to match in with the “Hypergiant” corporation design aesthetics. The character also had a lot of simplification to go through as well as updating them to be compatible with customisation etc.
Zooming out & Planet / universe concepts
As mentioned previously the ability to zoom out almost infinitely again caused us more than a few issues in the art department. The camera shifting so much meant that we couldn't hide a lot of our sins like many other fixed camera games could and so we had to consider everything we put in as the edges could potentially be seen. It made sense for space to have more of a realistic feel with the planets and the planet cores feeling like little marble / toy balls with minimal detail to match in with the rest of the artstyle.
Astronimo is coming to Steam in Early Access later this year and we can’t wait for you all to be able to play it.
Until then add the game to your Wishlist, follow Astronimo on Twitter and join our Discord.