Mood boards for concept art

Establish a long term vision for our game

(This blog post corresponds to the first slideshow presentation of the game done in class)

Mood boards are a composition of multiple images that inspire the team to image the future look and feel of the videogame. In the case of videogames, it does not need to be gameplay screenshots of existing games. In the case of SEGA Rally, the team took inspiration from real-life settings in Europe instead of other videogames. This makes special sense because before their game there was not a popular 3D rally game on the market to take inspiration from.

At this point, we have decided to make a game similar to Worms and voted as a group to call it Waiting Wizards. Firstly, as a reference to the magic thematic proposed by Marcus. Secondly, for the turn-based gameplay that it will possess.

With Diego, we started to look for various art styles we were thinking originally in something darker, think Castlevania Symphony of the Night for the original PlayStation or newer indie games inspired by that style.

My first proposal was to create something medieval and dark, think Castlevania or the indie game Dead Cells.

My take: the concept is neither good or bad, but i could have gone something a little less dark to gain support of the team. Something like Shovel Knight.

Diego’s moodboard was even darker than mine and super bloody so we could murder the wizards instead of just defeating them.

My take: I don’t mind bloody games, so i could easily accepted going with this style. That being said, i don’t confuse gore with gameplay. For example, I don’t consider Mortal Kombat on the same level as Street Fighter. I know the fatalities are fun, but they are a quick time events that trigger a cinematic sequence, instead of a true gameplay feature. On the other hard, Doom with the theme of Mars has become the Christian representation of hell, has a “kill or be killed” gore theme very well impremented to show the damage deal to the enemies and quickly undestand when they are dead, so you can focus on your next target. This is specially important because first person shooters where new at the time, and you cannot recycle the technique of 2d platformers of just removing the defeated enemies, it would look out of place in a 3d, less abstract environment.

This gory style would had being a nice challenge, and following the Doom example instead of the Mortal Kombat one, could have truly inspired different mechanics for a different game than Worms.

Lisa’s mood board is a happy go green scenery full of cute creatures. It takes inspirations of games like Rayman Legends, Unravel a game published by EA, and cute game characters.

My take: I remember as a teenager preferring “edgy” games, think about Sonic and SEGA instead of Mario and Nintendo. As an adult, I remember fondly how dumb that was, but hey! pre-teens were easily impressed by SEGA doing that Nintendon’t marketing campaign. Now I consider games that I did not like at the time, as true masterpieces, the best example is Super Mario Bros 2: Yoshi’s Island.

This is the first concept art. It is a mashup of elements of the Unity asset store for the background, player characters and spells, and the player & boss energy bar of the game Castlevania Dracula X for the SNES. (a port/remix version of the game Castelvania: Rondo of Blood for the PC-Engine)

The game aesthetic and choice of characters would have allowed thinking of implementing close-quarter combat elements for a more unique perspective. It may sound impossible to mix turn-based games with close-quarter fighting mechanics, and no game has popularized it, but there is one RPG from Konami that tried it, called Hybrid Heaven for the Nintendo 64. This course would had being the perfect testbed for testing something like this, even if the conclusion was: “this does not work”.

The team decided to go for a lighthearted style to be closer to Worms, the source of inspiration. So I scrambled to look for something similar for the presentation. Luckily the Unity asset store has vast amounts of free assets, so we quickly created a new mood board this time focus on a cartoony style that can be enjoyed by everyone.

After deciding with a cute style instead of the medieval one, the team agreed with the vision of this mood board as the basis of the game.

As one can see, it is a bit closer to Lisa’s mood board. Unfourtanely this is when I started suspecting that the team was on a collision course to be a clone of Worms. As stated before with Yoshi’s Island, a cute art style is perfectly acceptable, but when your source of inspiration (Worms) also shares that same art style, it is better to try to use an art style as different as possible to differentiate yourself and avoid “copycat” accusations.

SEGA did the same mistake, by using an art style to close to the original Super Mario Bros in their game Alex Kidd. Nevertheless to say, the game was not successful to establish a franchise. Only when they understood the core concepts of Mario, they created something the opposite of it and created Sonic the Hedgehog.

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