Hey there, it’s Tony again! How has your week been? Oh no, your boiler’s broken? That’s always a pain, especially going in to Winter.
Anyway, in this update I wanted to write a bit about the thing that probably first drew your attention to Dead End Job - the lovely art. As I mentioned in an earlier article, I realised that my art “skills” wouldn’t be anywhere near good enough to do the game justice (if you want to know the extent of my art ability - the main characters in our first game were a pair of circles).
I would like to say that I searched high and low to find someone who could bring the vision to life, but it’s not true - at this point I didn’t really have a vision of what I thought the game should look like, and I also knew Joe from hanging out with mutual friends at a developer conference, and enjoyed his squishy deforming animation style, so I quickly got him on board.
Now, not being an artist, I don’t want to get in the way of “the talent” that much, so there were only two bits in the art direction I gave Joe:
- No pixel art
- Has to be eye catching
Not that I have anything against some well done pixel art, and there are some gorgeous games out there that do it amazingly, but at the time I felt like the other games we’d be compared to were Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, and Nuclear Throne. Since they’re all pixel art, I wanted Dead End Job to stand out from them.
He got to work finding references of brightly coloured cartoons and artwork, and bunging them together in to mood boards. You can see a progression in ideas from the flat colours in the first board, through much punchier contrast in the second, and on to the cartoon style we eventually found.
From this he did some quick initial character sketches as a colour test - what I still find amazing about this picture is that Hector was pretty much nailed from day 1, though originally Joe thought of the big guy as being more of the mentor with you playing as the skinny kid in the bottom left. As soon as I saw him I knew he had to be the lead, he’s just so full of enthusiasm and character.
The final step for the main visuals was to make a mockup screenshot, so that we had something to aim towards as we put art in to the prototype, as we needed to get a feel for how the characters would sit in a typical level, how big they’d be, and how easy they would be to visually tell apart from the backgrounds.
This update’s already a lot of words and I haven’t even talked about the title sequence yet! Once we knew we were going for the 90’s cartoon look, I was dead set on having an animated intro sequence to the game, with a theme tune. For me, the bit above everything else that sticks in my head about cartoons like Animaniacs, Spongebob, Taz-Mania, and my all-time favourite Freakazoid, was the 30 second sequence and song that rapidly introduces you to all of the characters and the set up of the show.
You could watch any episode and these action-packed tunes get you quickly up to speed. For an action game I think it’s a brilliant idea as well - I’ve played a lot of games that have fast paced arcadey gameplay, but that spend a long time at the start introducing the characters and telling you what you’re doing. I wanted Dead End Job to basically take 30 seconds to say “here’s everyone, you’re rescuing Beryl, but also now forget about all of that, it’s not really important”.
I guess the last thing to talk about art-wise is the variety of art styles in the game. The cartoon references we’d picked used occasional cut aways to close ups with really gross amount of detail, or to live action segments and still, or just something weird to give it an extra surreal moment. To us, this meant we really had free reign to mix it up a bit depending on the context.
So for example we wanted the cutscenes to use a style that emulate cel animation a little bit better than the in-game graphics do (with no lighting, and characters drawn bolder against softer background colours). There are also a couple of points in these scenes were we use cutaways to real world stuff - the sequence where you first see Hector’s handbook in particular still makes me laugh now.
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Right, I think that’s plenty for this week? Since I’ve talked so much about Hector and Beryl, I think next week it would be a good idea to give you a proper introduction to the rag-tag staff of Ghoul-B-Gone, and some of the ghosts you’ll be fighting.
See you next week (and I hope you get your boiler fixed by then)!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/827610