Hi everyone! I'm San, the art director of Deck of Haunts, and in this developer blog, I'll be taking you on a visual tour of our haunted mansion. Don't forget to bring your sanity with you on the way out—you don’t want to lose it. Let's begin.
The Foundation
Down here in the basement is where we started laying the foundation of the whole game—including the art. When we began the project, we had to decide how to best approach the visuals. Early on, we discussed what emotions the game should evoke in the player. This gave us plenty of clues about how the art style could reinforce those feelings. As a small team with some experience, we wanted something that looks appealing yet achievable. While AAA graphics with highly polished assets were outside our scope, we aimed for more than simple indie visuals to reach a broader audience.
From those meetings and brainstorms, we settled on a few core concepts. The first one is the power fantasy of being an evil haunted house. That means a dark color scheme with unsettling lighting, sharp corners everywhere to indicate the danger of the house, and dark, looming shadows in the corner of every room.
Our color palette created from movie stills
The second one was adding our own spin to those horror tropes: an art-deco mansion as a sort of familiar-yet fresh visual flavor for the haunted house. We chose this style not only because we love art deco, but also because it’s sharp corners and patterns fit in well with our shape philosophy.
Lastly, we added a comic-book effect that gives outlines and more texture to all our assets. This makes them more visually appealing and does most of the heavy lifting in making all the assets coherent and engaging.
These combined concepts should provide an interesting hook when people see the game for the first time, while still engaging enough to keep those people immersed even after many hours of playtime.
One of the first visual iterations for Deck of Haunts
Into the frying pan
Let’s head back to the main floor into the kitchen, where we’re currently cooking up all those concepts into an actual art style. Too many cooks spoil the broth (although in this house broth is better with some extra cooks in there), so thankfully with our small talented team we can discuss and progress very fast when making the art. Let’s take a look at the specific challenges our game brings.
The current state of our game
The Pros
- Single Location — Since we only have one area in the game we don’t need to worry about creating a million objects or multiple locations with specific set dressing. This saves a lot of time in terms of unique assets and areas we need to make for the game.
- Assets have great efficiency — Most of the stuff we make will be seen by the player. If you suddenly decide to stop playing or rush through certain parts there wont be any skipped areas where we painstakingly created tons of unique assets for — a great benefit of having a tight gameplay loop.
The Cons
- Everything changes all the time — Since the house is built dynamically, we have fewer “cheating” options compared to static environments. Baking (more cooking references, yay!) light and shadows is very hard to do this way. Using real time lighting looks nicer but drains a lot of computing power on your device and might not work on lower-end devices.
- Partly random generated — The players will be making a lot of custom shapes with the rooms so sometimes it’s tricky to anticipate all the layouts and still make it look good in every way.
Testing big room shapes
We’re still polishing the art but the feedback on our visuals has been amazing so far! A good indication that we’re achieving what we set out to do from the start.
Through the roof
Slaps roof of hou- wait, we don’t actually have a roof yet.
We’re putting the last finishing touches on the house the coming months. Loads more rooms, specific objects, shader tweaks, special effects, etc. We’re *almost* done but still putting the final polish on everything and everyone. Thank you for reading and next time I will be delving deeper into the UI of the game! Time to pack our coats and sanity and hea- wait anyone smell that? Oh well must be my imagination. Until next time!
