Getting the look and art style of a game right is really important. Like, really important. I'm a programmer by trade, and unfortunately I suck at art. Since I don't have the budget of larger games like Advance Wars or WarGroove I decided to go for a very distinctive, simple and bold art style.
But like all things, it's taking more work than you'd think it would. At first we decided to keep it simple. Real simple. I really liked Into the Breach's pxielly isometric art style. However, I've also really liked the look of those comic book dots (Ben-Day dots) to give shading. The pixel art equivalent of this is dithering. The spacing of black dots gives it an appearance of a gradient, even though we're just using two colours - black and white (look at the forests to see what I mean).
Oof that's some rough UI looking back. Oh well. As for the battlefield, we felt that black and white wasn't enough. What would it look like if we simply coloured each sprite a single colour (with black of course being present)?
Hmm. Not bad. We worked more on our two-tone sprites, and it's shaping up nicely.
Well, that's not terrible. The colours you'd expect are there - water is blue, trees are green. But the dithering combined with pastel colours still isn't quite there yet. Something's missing. Je ne sais quois. It just wasn't bold or striking enough. If someone walks by me (or hopefully other people) playing the game, I want them to stop and say "Woah, what's that?!" It doesn't have to be technically impressive, but it's gotta be striking, bold and distinctive.
My artist friend who I hired for the game suggested looking at old monster movie posters movies themselves for inspiration. Well, the movies didn't help for the art style, but their posters sure did!
We could base our colour palettes from those! We picked out 5 colours from certain posters (with black and gray always being present), and coloured EVERYTHING on the in-game battlefield with those colours. Key interactable items (units, production buildings) got a vibrant bright colour, non-interactable units/buildings got gray, and terrain got shades of our secondary contrasting colours. It had never occurred to me before, but apparently colours on opposite ends of the colour wheel are contrasting (remember I'm a programmer). This revelation really blew my mind.
And there you have it. I think it looks striking, bold and distinctive, if I do say so myself. We still have background and UI to work on, but the battlefield itself is looking pretty nice.
