Color Palette

We are still in the process of choosing and deciding the best color palette for our game, but we have a base set!

Character Colors

The characters will be varied in color, but mostly they will all very vibrant and bright to make them stand out on the background.

Environment Colors

The background will have some very bright colors here or there, but will mostly be composed of blues, browns, grays, and other muted tones. Bright colors will be extremely noticeable on purpose to draw the player's attention to things in the background, usually as part of our game mechanic to distract the Sketch Artist from the person they are interviewing to make the game more challenging!

About Sketch Artist

The entire city has experienced a blackout of all recording devices and TVs, and crime is running rampant! With nothing to take pictures or record with, witness testimony is the only way to pick out our criminals and serve them justice!

So where do you fall in?

The Sketch Artist has been hired to help identify perpetrators based on witness feedback because of the sheer volume of criminals being brought into the City Police Station every day. You, the Sketch Artist, are to listen to the victims of crimes as they describe who they saw, draw a picture based on the description or write notes on your sketch artist notepad (tablet touch screen), and quickly pick out the correct criminal from a lineup.

If you choose correctly, you might even earn a doughnut!

Our world is filled with crazy scenarios, surprises, and lots of distractions. Dive in and discover hidden plots, mysterious criminal masterminds, and maybe even a conspiracy or two!

So what are you waiting for? Get to work, Rookie!

Previous Characters

Our capstone rapid prototype included some colored characters. This was during the process of trying to get our game to the next development stage. They are an example of the type of characters we plan to develop in the future, though they will be closer to the style of Ido Yehimovitz in the future. Art by Katie Freeman.

Style - Artist Influences

For Sketch Artist, we chose the artist IdoYehimovitz to influence our character style and Vincent Bisschop to influence our environment designs.

Character Style:

Sketch Artist is heavily dependent on good characterization and humorous visuals to keep our players hooked. Our game’s charm is its strong-point. Because of this, we had to carefully choose a style that would help us made our characters as memorable and aesthetically pleasing as possible. Shape is important for our game mechanic of providing descriptions for the sketch artist to identify a character by, and Ido’s style has great use of shape and exaggerated features.

Ido’s style utilizes thin lining inside of the characters, and no outside outline. We plan to mimic this exact styling in our final characters, which we feel will not only be visually appealing but will also make animating the 2D characters using 3D rigging much easier. The rigs will be made in Maya, and the lack of outside outlines will make the pieces easier to create for each rigged character.

The color if Ido’s work is bright, often utilizing saturated lighter colors and pastels. Along with the lack of an outside outline, these colors will really help the characters pop on top of our background. The game will be released on tablet; we want the characters easily identifiable from the background despite being on a small screen.

The characters will also have shading like Ido Yehimovitz’s, hard lines with no blurring of colors darker than the main body, then some slight gradients to provide texture and draw attention to certain parts of different characters. This will make the animation on animated characters much more seamless and much easier to accomplish (no issues with odd stretching of softer shadows), and also will set the characters apart from the softer-shaded environment.

A lot of our inspiration for our wacky character designs comes from Ido’s amazing character sketches. He has unique caricatures of many different types of people. When viewing his art, some of the designs make you smile or laugh. Our goal with our art is to accomplish the same sense of joy and humor when people view our unique lineups of characters.

Environment:

Our environment will have a softer, more textured appearance, different from our characters. We want it to blend into the background until it’s SUPPOSED to distract you as our distracting game mechanic. With a softer look, we’ll be able to easily direct where we want the player’s eyes to go.

For the backgrounds, we are using inspiration from Vincent Bisschop and his angled, exaggerated structural shapes in some of his art. It’s very stylized and cartoony and feels like it would fit perfectly in our wacky world of our game. The colors are also bright pastels, which we will tone down. We’ll be choosing the more muted tones that you can find in many of Vincent’s art pieces so that the characters stand out from the background.

Vincent’s works have a soft look to them, but defined shadows as if it were built in 3D. We’ll be taking advantage of this and building our background out of 3D, which will then be rendered out into a still image that is edited for the final look. By using a render, we are not polygon limited despite being on a tablet platform and our 3D artist will receive more experience for his portfolio and more freedom in his designs. The shadows and models will be given a slight textured look that softens their appearance. It will resemble paint strokes or rubbed charcoal.

Vincent’s art has no outlines, just blocks of color. Our background, being made in 3D, will look similar as we will not be utilizing any toon shaders. Mainly, our style will be influenced by Vincent's use of shapes, angles, and exaggeration.





Animation:

Our animation needs to have personality! We decided on the style of Tex Avery for animation in terms of characterization and movement. Tex Avery's animations are very exaggerated and the motions pull your eye into the movement. Our only animated characters will be the interviewed characters and then reward animations for picking the correct, guilty perpetrators. The talking characters will be sitting, so their gestures and other movements will need to make up for this. Our style is humorous, and Tex Avery's more humorous style of animating even basic functions and movements will help us make these crazy characters feel believable and appropriately fun.

Environmental Concepts

Our background in our game will be a 3D render with some 2D paint on top of it to add the depth and softer affect we're looking for. Our goal is to not distract from the 2D characters in front of it. The background will have softer shading with a textured look while the characters will keep a hard-line style of shading, also in an attempt to keep the eyes on the characters and keep the screen from appearing busy!


The below art is by Jose Morales.

Character Thumbnails

Our game is extremely reliant on having many characters, all of them well-crafted and filled with personality!

This week we have started the process of creating those characters, which begins with a thumbnail stage that explores numerous designs without allotting too much time to a single design that might not be continued. The designs that are favored will then be taken to the next stage where we flesh them out with more detailed concept art.

Don Carlo Escargo is our Mafia Boss in our game. Our artist Jose Morales created these conceptual thumbnails, exploring possible designs.

Kelly Rodak created thumbnail concepts of one of our interviewed characters, the Hook Lady, who you talk to before the lineup process. This character will give a description of the villain that committed the crime against her, and then you have to pick them out from a lineup. In the story, the thief stole her hooked hand!

Kelly Rodak created thumbnails for the Country Crew, one of the gangs in our game's world. They work as part of a much larger crime organization that is uncovered as you play through the game!

In our word a lot of crazy characters come through the lineup. Included are aliens! Snaeliens are our alien race that are tied into all of the crimes in a mysterious manner that the player has to discover!

Katie Freeman worked on the designs for one of our main protagonists, Captain Walters. He's a hard working police officer who commands and guides you through your job as a sketch artist. "Get to work, Rookie!"

On top of our character thumbnails, we are starting to sketch out other characters in our games even if we don't see them. This will help us as game developers give ourselves a good feel for the world our game exists in. Here are some concept drawings of the player character (unseen in game) and what they could look like by Katie Freeman.

Mood Board 3

Jose Morales' mood board is inspired by Vincent Bisschop and Fernando Juarez for the environment's shapes and exaggerated features. Below are his reference images.

Mood Board 2

Katie Freeman's mood board was inspired by Ido Yehimovitz for the characters and Vincent Bisschop for the environment's shapes and exaggeration. Below are her reference images.

Mood Board 1

Kelly Rodak's mood board was inspired by the artist Pemille Orum for characters and shading and Vincent Bisschop for shapes of the environment. Below are her reference images.