How to optimize the creation of art for the game: 5 tips from OWL Studio

Using the example of working on the visual novel One Day in London, OWL Studio CEO Vera Velichko told how to speed up the creation of game art.

Vera Velichko

There is nothing more complicated and voluminous than a “simple project”. How much lies behind these “nothing complicated, the most ordinary, small, unpretentious, but there is work for a month.” Once upon a time, with about these thoughts, I started the One Day in London project. Less than three years have passed since we approached the final chapter of this novel.

Today I want to talk about art content for such “small projects”, namely, how to reduce the amount of work to doable and bring the project to completion.

For all the time we have been working on the novel , we have drawn:

• 84 full-screen locations, some of which are present in the game in several states;
• 30 characters, for 11 of which a series of poses and states are drawn;
• 39 story videos (motion design);
• 52 mini-games;
• a huge amount of accompanying art — interfaces, banners, in-game objects and other things (for example, 107 story achievements).

The visual style we have chosen for the novel is one of the most difficult to draw in the field of two—dimensional graphics. Realism. This means that all graphics are executed with a high level of detail and require high artistic skills.

By the way, about the artists: 22 people have applied their brush to its creation during the entire time of work on the project. Eight of them completed most of the work: these are two leads, key artists for locations and characters, a 3d artist who helped us with the design of locations, and a motion designer who was engaged in video clips.

Analyzing the path I have traveled, I can list several “boosters” that helped us increase the speed of development and get to the final stage.

“Timelines-pipelines” booster: +10 to the total development speed

The first thought I would like to share is the most obvious. However, this is the biggest pitfall of development — planning.

Probably, if I start spreading now about why I need dizdocks, timelines, pipelines and that’s all, many will consider the article captain’s: “The stump is clear, it’s not the first Monday in the army, we need to plan.”

But always the most “exciting” moment is when requests for a full graphics package for the game (drawing up a timeline for graphics development) come to our studio.

This stage always turns out to be unexpected for the developer. And most often, after the initial timeline, everything that does not fit into deadlines and budgets is thrown out of the project. Sometimes up to half of the content may end up in the trash.

When a developer starts a project without such preliminary calculations, assuming that he imagines the amount of work, considering the project “small”, deadlines and budgets simply end on this extra half of the content.

In addition, working according to the plan saves a huge amount of time for thinking and searching, allows you to constantly check the real speed of development relative to the calculated one. Without the latter, you will not be able to take the necessary actions in time to speed up the processes if you do not meet the deadlines.

As soon as we set up all these timelines, pipelines and dizdocks in the team, and began to calculate the amount of content per chapter before starting work, the development time for each episode was halved. And if it weren’t for the outsourcing pipe, to which our team flies immediately, we would have completed the project in less than a year.

Booster “Guide to Art”: +10 to the pumping speed of a new unit

As I wrote above, 22 artists worked on our project. Usually, project teams of this format are much smaller. But our number of participants from the artistic side is due to the studio’s outsourcing specialization. For this reason, there are twice as many artists in it as all other specialists combined.

Be that as it may, turnover is inevitable: either force majeure, or just circumstances have changed, then the team is expanding and new people come who know nothing about the project.

There is a rule in our teams: as soon as some general detail of the work on a long—term project becomes clear, which will be relevant for all subsequent work, this detail is entered into the guide. These can be starting characteristics (color scheme, style, reference projects, etc.), and certain tools used for certain purposes (up to the color value or layer style settings in Photoshop), and it can be an analysis of typical mistakes that are repeated by different performers in the same situations.

You need a separate time to do this, to keep the database up to date. But what an indescribable bliss it is — instead of lengthy explanations and going around in circles, just give a new person a link and say “sort it out.”

Development guides save the time of the most valuable team members — the time of managers and leads.

Booster “conveyor”: +10 to the speed of production of the same type of art

One day a new artist came to our studio and got his first task — to draw a pack of ten icons. By the evening of the first day, reporting on the work process, he sent me a file in which all ten were started. It immediately became clear — a man with experience.

Always, if you have to make a large number of the same type of art (pack of icons, pack of characters, pack of locations), the development of the entire pack in stages will be faster than drawing from beginning to end one by one (but here, of course, for each specific case you need to determine the objective stages and the number of objects in the pack).

When there are several artists in a team, the processes can be divided according to the skills in the team. The one with a well—placed hand and a good imagination draws concepts. The one who has an academic degree and a good understanding of light behind him has a chiaroscuro on the locations. Who is neat, then the final fine—tuning. Thus, we can not only divide the content into packages, but also run several streams at the same time: while the finalizer polishes the first package, and the academic works with the light on the second, the conceptualist has already started sketching the third.

Thus, for example, we closed the fourth episode of the novella with a team of five people for art in two months (these are 12 new locations, 6 new characters, 11 mini-games, 8 video clips – well, all sorts of accompanying trifles, such as achievements, objects and other things, plus advertising and design graphics in storeys).

Booster “photobashing”: +30 in the speed of work (valid only for realist artists)

“Use everything you can to speed up the work process” — this truth shocks many traditional artists at first.

Say, how is it — textures from photos? How is it — cut, paste, color-fit and finish? I’m an artist, it’s unsportsmanlike, Titian and Vrubel will spin in their coffins so much that I’m sorry-goodbye to my professional pride.

But we are not Ivanov, who wrote his “Appearance of Christ to the People” for 20 years and, as the history of art says, did not finish it (although I did not understand WHAT ELSE YOU WANTED TO FINISH THERE, man, stop it, stop as much as possible).

To reassure the artists who may be reading this article, I will say: the tools, including photo-bashing, do not say anything about the author’s art. A cool photographer on the phone will shoot better than an incompetent on the newest “DSLR” with a lens of three salaries.

When working on projects with a large number of tasks, compiling libraries of materials saves a lot of time. All the time of development, we carefully kept all these Victorian dresses, wallpaper on the walls, “gloomy clouds” and other constantly recurring fragments and sources. With the proper skill of handling all this, the speed of work can increase up to three times.

For example: to draw a plot location for our game with “hands” it would take a week and a half of working time. Using ready-made materials, our artists have reduced this time to three days per location.

But here it is important to take into account several points:

1) Respect copyright

It is necessary to make sure that the materials you use are freely available or purchased (drains save a lot in terms of high-quality materials for work).

2) “Do what you want, but so that it is invisible”

The picture, which shows the use of photos and textures, looks frankly bad. Everything that is written, inserted, and so on should be reworked and brought so that the work looks solid and completely drawn.

3) Photobashing is also a specialization

Do not take this as an option available to everyone without additional training: everything (from the selection of materials with the right lighting and level of detail to the general information of the picture into a single whole) requires both sufficiently high skills in Photoshop tools and a good artistic base. An artist who does not know Photoshop will take almost longer to cut an object out of a picture than to draw it from scratch. And an artist who does not know the principles of light, perspective and composition will not be able to assemble a picture into a single whole. And it will look like a low-budget HOG.

3d foundation booster: +20 to the speed of drawing objects with complex geometry

Masha Yartseva, who has been the art leader of the project since the third episode of One Day in London, has a saying: “Why did I draw a novel for a long time before? Because there was no trideshnik.”

The appearance of the trideshnik significantly accelerated our work on interiors: the simplest blank showing the structure, perspective and lighting in the room took the modeler from four to eight hours and saved 2d artists a couple of days. It is thanks to the modeler that in the fourth chapter, quite complex locations of the demon world appeared — crazy spaces from an architectural point of view, which we simply would not have had time to do without him.

We had the simplest three-dimensional blanks: a gray render without much detail. For artists, they played the role of a high-quality sketch.

On projects where photorealism is needed, the requirements for renderings are much higher: the 3d stage is a complete visualization of the interior, and only minor details and effects remain for 2d fine-tuning.

Conclusion

You can visualize the same idea in different ways. There are two main approaches — more complicated and simpler.

Sometimes the most visually stylish projects are obtained in conditions of limited resources, when artists are looking for an opportunity to express maximum information with a minimum of means.

In our team, discussions of art with the screenwriter were a constant source of local memes. They have always passed from the stage of “heavenly castles” to “earthly cities”, the construction of which would fit within the capabilities of our architects.

Also on the topic:

• From simple to complex: the history of the development of mechanics One Day in London
• OWL Studio: “visual novel for an artist – an outlet”