Frozen Synapse: A quick look at concept art

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that our original concept artist had departed to pastures new.  He was kind enough to recommend a new guy to us, so please welcome Johan to the Mode 7 fold!

Johan and I have been thrashing out some of the issues to do with level backgrounds.  Here is a current-ish in-game grab:

Some of the issues people currently have with the level art are:

1.)  It doesn’t look like there’s any floor, and the characters are floating in space

We found that having a tiled floor, or a flat bitmap floor, or a coloured gradient floor looked incredibly dull, hence the idea of the transparent floor.  We wanted to keep the good bits of that idea, but address people’s irritation with the “floaty” effect.

2.)  The background walls are confusing

There are randomly generated fuzzy walls under the level, to make it look as though you’re peering down through many different floors of the building.  This effect has never really worked as intended, and ultimately ended up being a bit confusing.

I thought you might like to see some of Johan’s early work on addressing this problem.  Something we’ve found is that it’s good to do little “sketches” of different aspects of the issue before moving on to a full image of the new concept. So…

One of the first things Johan did was to strip everything back to give a clearer outline of the level.

Here, he tried some experiments with a glass effect on the floor.

Next, he looked at “tech” elements – small 2D symbols and text snippets.  This is the direction I wanted to go in.

We ended up with this composite image, showing the tech stuff mapped onto cuboids and incorporating the glass idea.  I think things are looking better already, but now he’s busy fleshing this idea out.

I still want the idea of depth and perspective in the background, like you’re looking down into a huge cityscape: the cyberpunk aesthetic of a city of data!  I think by extending and randomising these cuboids, as well as creating some other elements, we’ll be able to get this effect without the annoying “floatiness” creeping back in.

And now for my final Singapore-based update on LIFE…

It’s a little bit difficult to get hold of books in Singapore.  No trouble in this shop, though!  Luckily they’re all in English…

We went on a dodgy harbour cruise on a dodgy Chinese boat.  There were lots of these things.

If you’re in Singapore, have dinner at Equinox.  Flipping amazing view – quite inspirational for the city in Synapse!

These little dudes are everywhere.

I always miss home hugely after being away for more than a week, but arriving at the airport and seeing this….who POSSIBLY thought this was a good advert for the UK?  Cheap buses to SOLIHULL – a completely miserable place next to Birmingham.  Appalling.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 2:43 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Frozen Synapse: A quick look at concept art”

1. Herr_Alien:

   § December 9th, 2009 at 10:06 am

   “These little dudes are everywhere.”
   I once heared they actually keep them to get rid of mosquetoes.

   Regarding floors, is it possible to also do some sort of pattern-fill, like Gimp does?
   You can use then simple patterns like wood flooring (parquet?), or ceramic tiles, and even some sort of simple carpet. Look at the floors in offices, and see if it works in blue only. If it does, make a simple pattern out of it and fill regions of the floor with it.

2. Paul:

   § December 9th, 2009 at 11:38 am

   Geckos – they “cluck” really loudly as well.

   Pattern fill – cheers for the suggestion, however, flat textures on the floor tend to look REALLY bad. I know what you mean (use floors to suggest different kinds of building) and we’ll definitely do a bit of that, but because of the perspective a very tiled-looking repeating pattern does look fairly horrible, unfortunately.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website