Marvelous Polish and a Light Speed Concept

This week in class we talked about how we could use the environments that i worked on last week to make a more dynamic environment. We thought about playing with the perspective of the backgrounds to make it look like the player is going around the city while keeping it in a 2D plane, this is a very interesting art style called glide perspective sadly there aren't many references and the only good example i have been able to find wasn't very helpful. Another concern we had was that we didn't know how glide perspective would work with the 3D platforms in which the players are fighting on. Speaking of the 3D environments, junior Taber Noble has agreed to help us out with the 3D platforms for the city scape this is a very exciting development as we were all dreading on having to work on 3D environments, Cheers!
So back to the topic, with 3D environment art taken care of we still have to figure out how the 2D backgrounds will work, we decided that we would separate the stage into three comic book panels, each panel will feature a different part of the city and they will be separated by destructible gutters which the characters will be able to punch, kick, and fly through in real time throughout the battle. Possible ideas for the background on each panel would feature different districts which would be represented by class for example the rich districts would be represented with skyscrapers, the middle class could be located around the water and have bridges and docs themes, and the lower class district could be represented with slums and not so tall architecture in the distance.
Sadly concept art for these is not available yet but at least we have a concrete idea of the goal which we want to achieve. You might be asking yourself, Why is there no concept art for these backgrounds? great question! backgrounds are without a doubt an important part of the game and a requirement for green light however in the grand scheme of things the characters are a bigger more important part which undoubtedly will be more time consuming and as such we wanted to get Major Marvelous finalized and a concrete Light-Speed Lass concept ready for her to start being modeled.

Starting with Major marvelous Tristan needed a concrete idea of the parts of the costume/armor to finish up MM, now part of the process of creating characters in the professional world is a back and forth between the concept artist and the 3D artist so what i focused on this week for Major Marvelous was to do a paint over in order to define the forms, and textures of what the costume will look like.

After doing the paint over i decided that there was something odd about him. I figured out that the pants were the reason so i updated them.

I felt like the blue pants unified the costume much better and the team agrees, so after a slight change in the armor and the colors we now have our finished MM concept, HOORRAYY!!!

Last but not least my other focus this week was Light-Speed Lass. First lets recap on the previous concepts

  i took the colors of the most successful option that we had before and updated it with some of the things the team want which include a light armored look, streamline design, segmented costume. Since her suit acts as a space suit as well as her defining super hero costume i wanted to give her a shiny futuristic look.

I tried to give her different pieces on her armored suit to break simetry and keep the design interesting however i wasn't too sure on what to do with her helmet so for now lets disregard the face as i need to consult with the team about what worked best on the earlier concepts and what could work given the new direction.

Backgrounds for the green Light

This week in class we discussed the requirements that we absolutely need to meet in order to get the green light to start "production" of Crisis of the super verse. One of the main things that we need is to make the game feel like the player is fighting inside a cosmic book, a way in which we want to give the players such feeling is to switch from 3D rendered backgrounds to 2D images with parallaxing effects to simulate depth.
The challenge with this is that out main producer wants us to be able to show at least 3 different art directions in which Environments could be portrayed as 2D.

Personally as an artist I am big into detail, but for the purpose of this game I have to stray away from that because the environments are an asset which we will use to create the feeling of being in a comic book but we don't want them to steal the show from the super-powered action going on within them. For this reason we have decided to take a more simplistic approach. Looking through some TV shows and references of what has work for shows and games before we stumbled upon a classic, Samurai Jack. We enjoyed the simplistic look of the environments because they didn't detract from the characters.

What i really enjoyed from the backgrounds is the black simple shapes that clearly represent buildings. From a comic book perspective these black shapes fit perfectly in my vision for the backgrounds because most comics have that similar look with hard black shadows which i think players will relate to.

 The idea behind these backgrounds is that they will be split into different layers and they will move at different speeds (parallax) to simulate depth. These are just concepts pieces however if we decide to go with this art style then i will add more variation in the buildings for the foreground and the background as well as more lights which will add more atmosphere to this metropolis that we are trying to portray.

Other ideas for different art styles we want to try out are along the lines of the Venture Brothers which use many more colors but they still keep simple shapes and use different blending techniques to make their buildings and props look simple yet easy to read.

Also another art style that i am very excited to try out is along the lines of Spectacular Spider Man, this art style uses simple shapes yet differentiates the buildings by using different colors fort he brick and the windows.

Again the idea is that the backgrounds provide a sense of atmosphere without distracting the player from the action.

New Year, New Project, New Game

The year ended, and with it some projects were left behind, others moved on. I was put on a new project, The Crisis of the Super-Verse, a fighting game where super heroes take the center stage and battle it out in different stages corresponding to each one of their stories. The game has solid game mechanics, but the art needs a revamping which is where i come in.
I am a huge comics fan so this is a huge opportunity for me to take the lead artist position and make some awesome art for my portfolio as well as helping make the art be as successful part of the game.
The first changes we talked about was how to turn a fighting game, into a fighting game that takes place inside a comic book. Right off the bat we knew that the backgrounds needed to be changed, as of now they are rendered in 3D space, what we want to do is make the backgrounds 2D so relay the feeling of being inside the comic book.

My first assignment as lead artist was to update the two preexisting characters, Major Marvelous, and Light-Speed Lass.
I want the characters to have a modern look, old school comics have more of a simple design and both Tristan and I agreed that we want to give our characters some visual interest, this would open some creative doors and make the characters more interesting to concept and to model. We turned to the DC New 52 comics in which all of the new super heroes got their costumes revamped. For the major marvelous concepts i looked at characters such as Superman, Batman, Shazzam, the Sentry, and Captain America.

 I really liked how their costumes stayed simple yet the artists used simple shapes to make them look more armor plated. This is an idea that me and Tristan really liked so we adopted it into our Major Marvelous costume.

Out of this four iterations we decided to go with the fourth option. We liked the way the suit was broken up and it looked not only like a super suit but also like a suit of armor. Since the battle will be among super heroes they need the right kind of protection. Once we had decided that we wanted the 4th suit we wanted to go with for Major Marvelous i made a concept art piece out of it so that Tristan could start modelling him and we could get the animations on the way.

I also did some concepts for Light-Speed Lass. She still needs some work but the concepts are based on the Flash, her bio says that her suit also acts as a space suit that is why i made a heavier version. We are thinking about keeping the color scheme of the first suit but again giving it a more segmented and armor plated look.

When the team showed my work to professor Nadel he really liked the idea of going with the New 52 style he said it would work as a satire because he doesn't think that DC's new comics makes sense. I personally don't have a problem with the direction DC has taken but i do like the idea of poking fun at this controversial situation that is taking place in the comic book world.