Video games can use different styles to create their own look and feel.for Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, I knew from the start that I wanted to use something very colorful and unrealistic for many reasons. To set it apart from other games in the genre, it approximates the animation and color palette so that it can be stylized and exaggerated. Illustration and punk fantasy art inspired the creation of the world in the first place.
Stylized rendering is a powerful tool to make it stand out. “What are you going to draw?” and “how do you draw ” Two different questions. This is his third visit to the surreal world of Xenozoics and the primitive humanoids that inhabit them, but the first to approach ‘how to draw’ in a completely different way.
There were many different methods, and I tested several different styles before arriving at the one I used. Choosing what to simplify and what to exaggerate can have very different effects. One interesting style we tested was the look of thick painterly brush strokes (pictured above). It allowed for very expressive forms, a cluttered, almost Impressionist look, and was certainly very different.
In the end, we decided against this style because it was overly simplistic. Artists have always wanted to add finer details to their characters and environments that this Impressionist style doesn’t do justice to.
The rendering style we ended up aiming for is called hatching or cross-hatching. It is a painting style that creates shadows and conveys light by drawing dense lines. The closer the lines, the darker the area. This style is often used in traditional drawings, illustrations, and comic books to give the artwork a hand-drawn look. This technique allowed him to achieve his style of illustration while maintaining detail.
By isolating the lighting information and conveying light intensity and detail primarily in ink pencil linework, you can treat color as a separate layer. This allows for a more artificial color scheme that looks odd in a realistic rendering style but feels consistent with the look of the illustration. Purple and orange skies, blue or yellow skin characters, orange stains, light blue and green mineral deposits on the walls of the mountains… Deliberately using highly saturated colors or color combinations that are difficult to find in nature. to tell you that this is another world.
One of the main challenges in getting hatch styles to work was making sure they worked at different distances and different levels of detail. Don’t just draw lines on the surface. It might work well for small details up close, but it might not work for mountains in the distance. Also, some features need to be preserved more carefully, such as the character’s eyes, which are the focal point, and must always remain clear and sharp. The lineart should be consistent so that everything looks like it was done with the same tool.
Finally, we designed a very specific look for the game, but chose to enable configuration options for players to personalize the look. Players can choose a cleaner look, add and remove effects. We also left the comic-inspired black and white mode.
Clash: Artifacts of Chaos Released on March 9th, Available for pre-order now On Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or join his official Discord server if you’re interested in following all the upcoming news, developer blogs, and trailers.
Clash: Artifacts of Chaos
Nakhon
