Adventure Game Art Reviews: Session 1

Allright, art's my thing. It's what I like to do. But it's also something I like to look at, and today I'll be highlighting an artist who has had a big influence on my pursuit of game-art excellence. His name's Bill Tiller, and I first stumbled across his art in a LucasArts adventure game called The Curse of Monkey Island. Bill was responsible for the look of all the game's lavish backgrounds, we well as contributing illustrations to menu's and inventory items. Here are a few screenshots. Looking over those images, a few elements immediately come to the forefront; lighting, atmosphere, quality of line.
Lighting: You don't have to have excellent lighting to make an excellent piece of art. It helps, but it's not strictly necessary. What it does do though, is enliven the viewers imagination. If you see a shadow or bounce of light you don't immediately understand, your eyes will follow the clues. This results in more looking, which is huge. If you can get people to stare at your art for more then a few seconds, then some would say that you've succeeded as an artist. Bill's use of dramatic lighting makes the difference between a series of themed art images and a living, breathing game.
Atmosphere: It's possible to be manipulated by images (which has nothing to do with the popular craft of image manipulation, such as using photoshop to put your boss's head on a monkey's body) . When an artist can identify what elements of our world have an emotional impact on us, and then mimic those elements in a piece of art, he or she is attempting to influence (or manipulate) how we're feeling when we view the art. Bill does a fine job of using sunlight, moonlight, clouds, mist, fog, shadows and water to give the images a great psychological impact. Here's one of my favorite examples. Spooky, eh?
Quality of Line: Art's made up of a lot of different things. And while Mr. Tiller has a lot of good going for him in The Curse of Monkey Island, it's my opinion that his unique line work carries the art to a uniquely awesome place. I don't think a single stait line exists in the entire game. The scenes ooze all over the place - candlesticks twist against gravity, sandbars sag against the tides and tattered ship's sails twitch in the wind. Even the light seems to bounce about. In short, Bill isn't attempting to reproduce our reality on paper; he's making his own bizarre cartoon world where things don't always follow the rules.
Bill left Lucasarts ages ago. Currently he's his own boss; his home-grown game studio is called Autumn Moon Entertainment, and is based in Petaluma, California (about 50 minutes north of San Francisco). My fiancee and I were traveling through the area last summer, and Bill was kind enough to let us visit the studio and grill him insesently on his current project; a Vampyre Story. He, and his entire crew (which includes his wife Amy) couldn't have been nicer.

Inventories make Adventure Games Awesome

There are a few video game companies here in the Salt Lake area. I was happy to find a company called Eat, Sleep, Play, whose employee's developed a really cool game awhile back called Downhill Domination. The overall concept for that game is that you jump on a bicycle and take it down a mountain at incredible speeds. It was a very well done game, and I'm hoping to get a chance to visit their current companies studios. I've shot them an email - I'll let you know how that goes.
I've jumped back into the art side of the Incident at Long Rock Junction development. This game will be featuring a pretty sweet inventory system, and yesterday I wrapped up the design for the inventory access screen. I'm particularly proud of the rusty screw-holes I've includes, which you can see in the 'sneak-peak' image to the left there. Also, I love glowing buttons, and am using them all over the place. In the gaming world's that I paint, the glowing button salesman is very wealthy.
In other project news, our supervisor has returned to her post from a much deserved maternity break (welcome back Kathy!). This means that the other half of the training game team (Nathan) will have an opportunity to focus a little more of his time on game-wizardry.
Next time we'll have a new feature here on Voyage to the Unknown! I call it; Adventure Game Art Reviews! I look at a lot of different examples of adventure games, and would like to highlight some of the games (and artists) that I love to look at, as well as some that I think aren't so hot.

Reporting from Utah

And plan an inventory we did! The final written assets are falling into place this week, and we now have a clear development path all the way to the end. I'm very happy to be in this position, and even happier with how the game is coming along. Nathan and I are feeling very good about how the much-extended planning stages that this game has experienced are returning some big benefits. And those benefits will be enjoyed by our students sometime this fall! I'm in Layton Utah, which is about 40 minutes north of Salt Lake City. Besides the excellent hiking in the area, I'm going to be making an effort to learn about the games industry here in the beehive state. Until next week...

The Inventory looms...

Organizing and mapping out the final format of the game continues this week. All the "verbal" challenges have been penned, and a system of usable inventory items is being developed. I'm not as familiar with developing non-art assets, but my relatively short experience in the world of professional game-makery taught me a lot about the values of organization and a defined workflow. Nathan and I will be meeting later this week, which will be out last face-to-face meeting until mid August. We've fallen into a pattern of having two phone conversations a week, and meeting in person whenever I happen to be in town. My opinion is that the phone conversations are largely for keeping tabs and passing our own individual ideas back and forth, while the actual meetings in Nathan's office result in the best collaborative creation of "new stuff". As we need to peg down the game's inventory, we definitely need to meet in person. More next week, where I'll be reporting from the greater Salt Lake City area.