Introduction

Cohesive art for all assets in a game is vital for an immersive experience while playing the game. To ensure cohesion with several individuals working on art assets, we need an art direction that everyone needs to follow when making assets for the game.

Terms

Pixel: Smallest area of the screen composed of a single colour, several pixels combine in to an image. A pixel art is usually made out of 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, 64x64 pixels.

32 or # bits game: Informal term used to describe amount of memory used by numerous first generation game consoles. It is not a description of art style.

Decided Art Directions

1. Assets will be pixel art.
2. Top down view. (Elevated view point perspective)
3. As discussed at Poll players will be able to move and act in 4 directions, animations of each action will need to be in those 4 directions for animate objects (player, enemies etc).
4. Potentially player character design is already set if everyone agrees with current design.

Player character design

Credits to @Jing for the player asset examples.

New asset decisions

• New assets
  • Size
  • Colour palette
  • Style
  • Quality

These decisions must be made and followed before creating assets. Similar to the player asset above, if you decide that you wish to work on assets of a specific type, create examples and share on the documents on how to best create with explanation on why the decisions best suit the assets. If majority of the studio has no objections, it'll become the rule, which designers will have to follow when creating similar assets to ensure cohesion.

Object asset size

When making object assets, PC, NPC, items/obstacles it's important that they share a similar resolution which will make it easier to establish a consistent quality and style. While it's not limited or strict, it's important to take into consideration of scale and detail an object has in the game. With the current player asset 16x21, objects of similar size in comparison (e.g. other characters/npc and human sized objects) will share the similar size.

Colour palette

If you decide to create alternative position or variations of same asset, it's important to use the same colour palette to keep the colours of each variation of same asset consistent. When creating a asset based off from another asset, first open up the asset and extract the exact colours used, or save the palette used as a .png file or similar to allow designers to share colour palettes.

Style

It's difficult to have a consistent style between designers, however with pixel art helps to reduce variation to a degree, and applying similar techniques and colours will ensure that the style is cohesive to a degree.

Quality

When creating assets, do your best to ensure that your work is of similar quality to similar asset types (environment, characters, items). High quality assets might look nice, however it can become difficult for everyone to keep up the similar quality and other assets may appear to be low quality in comparison. It's not the most important aspect since designers can work together to make adjustments to assets to ensure they share same level of quality at any stage.

Environment tile size (example)

Examples

This is just an example. It will be preferable to create a new page and add the link to main page when creating a new type of assets.

Size

Example is a 32x32 tile asset that's available for free on Itch.io. With the character 16x21, 32x32 is a reasonable size for the environment.

Colour Palette

Colour palette will be . (It's really tiny, but most art software will be able to extract the colour palette out of the png for you to use. Right-click -> open image in new tab -> save image as). It's a basic palette with no significance just an example!!

Style

Discuss specific details and techniques that were used here. Shadows, colouring methods, orientation, animation techniques and variations rules etc.