Year 2 - Unit 69: Concept art for video games

Unit 69:
Concept art for video games

The stages that concept
art goes through to be
finished product.

How is concept art used now and what skills do you need?

Concept art is used in so many industries like film, tv, animation, comic books etc. But the most relevant to our industry is how it is used in the creation of video games. Generally concept art is used to influence the process of media products, it often is confused with visual development art or concept design however, they are not the same. The term 'concept art' has been used since the 1930s first by Disney, this term may have also come from the design of automotive for concept cars. Compared to the other industries it has been used in, the video game industry is easily the newest area it has featured in. As computing materials have grown in use and popularity concept artists not only need the skills of a fine artist but also know how to use certain graphic design programs, applications and software etc. to keep up with the standards of nowadays. Much like the games that are inspired by concept art they have different 'styles' and these can range anywhere from cell-shaded to photorealistic. Much like doctors there are concept artists who do everything (know as concept art generalists), but  there are also many who specialise in certain categories like character design, industrial design, environment design and creature design etc. As a concept artist they should know all the foundations of art like perspective, design, colour theory, anatomy and lighting as essentials.

Game Production Pipeline

Who is it useful for?

Concept art is useful for pretty much anyone in the games development. It is also useful to show how the work progressed to any interested parties. Generally concept art helps everyone involved to get an idea as to what they're working towards. This includes anyone from the artists to the programmers on the games project.

What stages is it used in?

The Art of  Naughty Dog
 book - merch based around
 concept art and finished art.

The game production pipeline consists of 3 main stages, pre-production (the exploration of ideas), production (approval of ideas by the publisher) and post-production (how the finished work is promoted to hype up the project). Obviously the two stages that seem the clearest are pre-production and the production as these are the stages that are the whole idea development and creation but also the concept art is used sometimes in post-production like on posters or even merchandise for the game. Ideas are refined in the first stage with the concept art being started, in the second stage the game art is designed based on a theme and the art can be anything from game menus and characters to art for promotion techniques. Also in the second stage programmers develop and build game logic based on the concept art, by the third stage all art should be refined to perfection and have progressed to its final form so that the game can be finished and approved for its launch.

Art and artists I like:

This is a piece of Eytan Zana's work from Uncharted 4

Generally it doesn't take much to impress me with artwork but it doesn't mean I like it, however I have managed to find 3 artists that I genuinely love with ranging abilities. The first is possibly the most impressive when it comes to detail and that is from a male artist called Eytan Zana  and he is currently working at Naughty Dog and is featured in the book mentioned above, he has worked on games like Uncharted 3 & 4 as well as The Last of Us. My favourite concept is the work displayed on the right, this is from when he worked on Uncharted 4 and this was for one of the first main environments when the brothers in the game travelled to Scotland. I like it because I really think it captures the beauty of Scotland, the style is obviously very photorealistic and has quite a dreary mood and also feeling lonely. The colour scheme of this art is pretty much white and brown which is the snow and the dying shrubbery contrasted with the grey of the skies.
His website is the following: www.ezdraws.com

This is the front cover of Telltale's
Sam & Max Season One game.

This is the back cover of
Telltale's Sam &Max
Season One game.

The second artist is Steve Purcell is an american cartoon artist who is the oldest of the three being 57 years of age, he created the duo Sam & Max and also done many covers and co-directed the film 'Brave'. I love his work on Sam & Max more than any of his other projects however because of how comical and original they are, it was a concept that he fully designed and refined alone right through from books to tv series and of course the video games. The thing I love about the game art to the right is how its so cartoon like and simple but also very complex at the same time. Its style is very comic book like and cel shaded, you can tell that it looks very edgy and dark. It's feel is that the environment that there in isn't very happy or somewhere you'd want to live and the main colour scheme is very sepia like using a lot of of brown and oranges except one of the characters which is white. I also really like the unnatural stances and body proportions which come with cartoon like games.

The third and final artist is Toby Fox but also Temmie Chang as their work together is incredible, Toby Fox created the game Undertale almost completely on his own from the music to the coding however although doing a very little amount of concept art Toby wasn't very good at it and enlisted the help of Temmie Chang. The drawings in the top left are the first sketches of a character called Alphys and Migosp, the image down next on the left is more work on Alphys and the start of a new character called Asgore, he is continues in the image to the left of that one. Toby Fox is 26 years old and Temmie is 25 years old. Temmie is credited within Undertale as the logo designer, overworld artist, shop artist, cutscene artist and title artist. The characters she is credited with as their conception artist is many with the majority being with Toby, however her cameo character  was fully her own.

Temmie's teaser art.

She is one of the main artists in Undertale despite being freelance. The image below is some teaser art by Temmie that she doodled for its making in the very front of the background on the right you can see the finished outline of the Alphys character and Asgore right at the back with his spear amongst other characters like Undyne. In the foreground it is the main character Frisk. I love Temmie's art below because of how its cel shaded and has a very dark feel and look but also a very happy one if you know the game well enough. Because this is only teaser art the colour scheme is very simple with just grey-scale themes and a hint of purple for the main character, this makes the characters we can't see mysterious and intriguing which is pretty obviously a good thing for a teaser. The finished product in the game is completely different to either of the concepts with it being pixel art (shown below). Temmie's art is also very happy and uplifting which is really nice to see (shown below with a birthday concept.
                                                                   

Temmie Chang's early concept art showing many of the
characters who are significant.

Alphys' finished character.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_art
http://ezdraws.blogspot.com/
http://conceptartworld.com/artists/eytan-zana/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_%26_Max_Save_the_World#Episodes
http://www.thunderchunky.co.uk/articles/hitting-the-road-with-steve-purcell/
https://twitter.com/tobyfox/status/818212964994088960
http://undertale.wikia.com/wiki/Temmie_Chang

Year 2 - Unit 4 & 5: Evaluation

problems
good/bad points of the game
others feedback
conclusion - what would you take from this project to the next one

Unit 4 & 5: Evaluation

I never really encountered any major issues when creating my game other than Maya files going up majorly in size for no particular reason, I did however realise when it got to the last two weeks that I didn't have much time to actually start blueprinting the game. The best parts of my game I think are the models, they made the entire game seem so pretty and aesthetic and sort of managed to redeem it from the lack of enemies and substance. I guess that was the most obvious point that was bad but because of my level being a tutorial and its purpose simply being to introduce the rest of game calmly and smoothly. I feel like I still should've added in some sort of enemy that chased you to the end of the pier to make you jump in. The environment probably didn't look as good as it could've just because of my balcony models being untextured, however those, the fence and the main gates are 100 percent my favourite parts of the game just because of the detailing and the being accurate to the real place. I guess I also came across the problem of not knowing what to do when it came to the blueprinting as we were never really taught Unreal's method.

When people gave me feedback their favourite parts definitely varied with one person saying they most enjoyed the exploration of the game, the next said when they jumped into the water and the last player said that they enjoyed shooting the bottles the most which didn't really surprise me at all. They also enjoyed the story elements, the map and the models, the fact that people actually appreciated my models meant a lot since I spent so much time on them. People generally wanted me to add more textures, connect my level to Charlies and add an enemy in but when it came down to what feature they would add two out of the three players said that they would add sound to the game and the third would add a time limit to make it seem more suspenseful. Out of these 2 options I would definitely add the sound effects. No one didn't understand anything which is obviously really good except the text was hard to read at times since it was all in white. No one thought any of the abilities were over-powered or useless except from the fact that the guns ammo was impossible to see. The only other feedback I got was that it was a good tutorial level and that they wished it could've maybe guided the player more.
In conclusion, from this project I would take my knowledge of blueprinting and my knowledge of Maya to my next project in University.