Welcome to our first developer diary! In this instalment, we’re going to be showcasing how our latest art refresh has made a massive impact on both the game’s performance and design 🎨 We hope you all enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at how and why we changed our art style!
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1858650/In_Sink/
You may be surprised to hear that we originally planned for In Sink to be split, with half of the game being a third-person platformer and half of it being a first-person escape room-style experience! We had been inspired by games like A Short Hike and thought a pixelated art style would really suit the type of game we imagined In Sink to be.
When we first started working on levels, we would render the game at a downscaled resolution and then stretch it up to the native resolution to achieve this art style. This meant that we needed to use single flat colors on all of the textures, as any sort of gradient or variation would look bad or the detail would get lost when the resolution was scaled down. In short, we had to keep it simple.
After we released our first demo for In Sink, we realised that what made the game so unique and attractive to players was the escape room element, so we made the decision to remove the third-person platformer aspect of the game and focus entirely on making an enjoyable escape room experience. Although we still liked the pixelated art style, we felt it didn’t really make sense for an escape room style game, where detail and clarity were of paramount importance. This was particularly significant once we decided to go in a totally language-less direction for the game.
With that in mind, we changed the original color palette for the game.
In the image above, you can see a comparison between our original palette and our new palette. This change opened up a whole new world of color and made objects in the game look more natural. The new shading/normal texture maps meant that we could create dark/light spots even without the presence of light in the room, as shown in the image below.
On top of making the levels look more natural and producing a design that we liked, there was another major benefit to this new system.
With the old palette, each object only had a single flat color on any given face of its mesh. This meant that certain objects required more faces in order to have any kind of color variation. These color differences were also a lot less gradual and therefore more obvious, giving the objects the “blocky” appearance characteristic of traditional pixel art.
By moving away from the pixel art style and switching to the new color palette, we were no longer limited to flat colors. Each color had a full variation from bright to dark and object faces were no longer limited to just one flat shade, which allowed us to cut down on the number of faces we needed in order to create color variations and gradients.
With the old system, we would have to create multiple faces on any given mesh to produce the effect of a light/dark gradient on the object itself. With the new system, we only needed to create one face to produce the same effect and the added color variety meant the gradient looked a lot smoother.
In this way, we were able to significantly reduce the number of triangles for each model, which meant our art refresh also resulted in a significant optimization upgrade as well!
Overall these changes have combined to create an art style that we’re a lot happier with. With all of the developer talk out of the way, here’s a screenshot demonstrating just how big of an impact this new system has had on the appearance of In Sink.
That being said, this wasn’t the only change we made to complete our new look!
Tune in to our next developer diary, where we’ll be talking about the changes to our new lighting system.
Want to meet other In Sink fans and challenge them to a speedrun in our prologue? Then don’t forget to join our Discord!
