Refining Visual Style

Hello everyone! Welcome to our first blog post. This week will be about how we've been refining our visual style, ensuring everything looks coherent between all the work created by our artists.

Coherency in Crumbs

One of our biggest focuses while developing Buggy Bogey has been making a space that felt like it had dense enough content, which we have done through a diversity of props (or crumbs, as we call them) and a selection of event triggers scattered around the map. One of our key inspirations when beginning our design was Katamari Damacy, and we wanted to emulate the huge amount of items Katamari allows you to pick up.

To create enough crumbs, we needed nearly all our artists to churn them out as fast as possible. This led us to our first point of ensuring a consistent visual style; all of our crumbs need to feel like they were made for the same game and fit into the same space.

A selection of crumbs being tested in engine.

With every crumb, we've ensured consistent poly count, texture resolution, and color palette, making them with a distinct creative vision.

Textures Fitting Together

We initially had an average of 7 artists at a time working on creating models for all of our crumbs. This ensured that we were able to create a sufficient amount to put into our game, but after all of the models were created, we came to our next step in a coherent style: our textures.

While we could have a large team of artists working on creating as many 3D models as possible, we realized that if all of our artists were making textures, we might end up with too much variation between crumbs. We decided to only have two to three artists creating textures. This allowed easy communication in a small group to ensure consistent work.

A texture atlas

One of our artists, Jaden, created a material preset for us to use while making textures. This was a great way of giving a consistent starting space for all of our crumb textures. Using a texture atlas (multiple crumbs being packed into one space for texturing) allowed us to keep our file sizes low while still having a huge amount of crumbs and textures. Pairing these atlases with Jaden's material presets allowed us to efficiently texture our crumbs while maintaining coherency.

A screenshot of the main level

Making our Map

As we continue onward into our development, I'm looking for ways to make sure that our visual style is conveyed in our map design. I've been working on creating new ground textures to keep up our cartoony art style, and Jaden created our city background you can see in the distance in the image above.

Some of our next steps as we head into our future development are going to be prioritizing getting our visual style fully developed and implemented into all of our work. We're all super excited for everything to come and we can't wait to have you along for the ride.

-Hayden Eshbaugh