Art Heist

"Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal."

-Pablo Picasso (attributed).

Stealing a sentiment from someone else seems like a good place to start our larger discussion about art, and the theft thereof. This week we'll discuss where the inspiration for isoChronal Panic!'s art style came from, and why we did it that way.

Now to clarify that bit about stealing up above, I'm not claiming to have plagiarized any other works of art for our game; my personal mark is on every single element of the game and it's all original, in the sense that anything can be considered original these days. While I can honestly claim that I didn't go in and literally trace any pictures directly into the art folder of the game, I can't say I didn't get some inspiration from other sources. Ideas for drawings don't just come out of the ether, and as such I've looked at possibly thousands of images for inspiration of what to draw.

To give a good example of just this sort of thing, we recently decided that we wanted to give the laboratory that Dan Guymore is stealing the Timetanium from the look and feel of a nuclear waste storage facility in order to imply that the Timetanium was somewhat dangerous, and say something about Dan's character that he didn't seem to care about the risks presented by the dangerous material he was about to handle. Okay, great, that's a good direction, but real quick art test for you guys at home: Without looking, draw me a room consisting of walls and floor that conveys the feel of a nuclear science. With only things like the wall and floor to go by it's pretty tricky.

To help you out, try a google image search for Nuclear Waste Facility. You'll start to see a lot of industrial concrete and safety railings, and upon looking at them you get a real sense of what these kinds of places look like. Specific knowledge into these sorts of facilities helps too, you could see some of the more famous nuclear science facilities, like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos; modeling the art in the game after these sites in particular makes the location seem more fully realized and less generic.

Once you have some inspiration for the art, then you need a specific style. In the game, the art style has a lot of crisp clean lines, with a few parabolic curves thrown in. Color is handled with overlapping simple geometric planes, or if we want to add a sense of texture, gradient meshes. All the shapes have a strong outline to help them stand out on the screen. Every object in the scene is viewed from an exaggerated top down perspective, the perspective is looking down from above, but all of the objects are themselves slightly skewed so that their tops are visible to the camera.

In the next art blog post, we will run through this entire process with one particular asset, so stay tuned.