Key art has one sole purpose: to excite the audience!
It is perhaps one of the most powerful yet complex
tools in the game industry and the success or total
failure of a marketing campaign can depend solely on
how well or poorly a game’s key art is designed. ThePROJECT TENGU X
SHOWCASE YOUR GAME IN KEY ART:
FROM INITIAL SKETCH TO FINISHED ARTWORK, LEARN HOW THE TEAM AT SAIZEN
MEDIA CREATES STUNNING AND MEMORABLE PIECES OF ORIGINAL GAME ART
ability of art to resonate with the target audience and,
at first glance, establish a direct connection with the
spectator, is the basic principle underlying the whole
notion of key art; set the mood, grab the attention,
explain the premise and hook the audience!SUMMING UP A GAME WITH KEY ART
01
SKETCH OUT IDEAS
Preliminary sketches and rough concepts
always represent the most important phase of the
creative process; during this phase the artist
explores possible approaches in composition, often
radically different from each other, experiments with
perspectives and visual weight distribution and
through an almost Darwinist approach, allows the
scene to surface from the canvas. It is in this phase
that the idea for the piece is truly born.04
CHARACTERS AND PLACEMENT
A scene is truly memorable and iconic only
as long as the balance between the environment and
the characters is carefully preserved. Our characters
will live in the foreground, therefore the environment
should wrap around them in a way that allows the
illustration to breathe and prevents visual clutter; this
guarantees the necessary depth of field, tricking the
eye into thinking that the road extends far off into the
distance where visually blocked off by the characters.02
SET UP THE SHOT
Once [we’ve] established the basic ground
rules that will guide our composition and the overall
aesthetic approach, we start setting up our shot; in
this specific piece we modeled the basic geometries
in CG using Maya, following our original sketch, and
subsequently worked over the occlusion pass in
Photoshop. This widely used approach allows us
quickly obtain a scene that has mathematically
correct perspective, [which is] very important for
animated shots or projection mapping and to
experiment with lighting choices.05
TEXTURES MAKE THE DIFFERENCE
Using a CG Occlusion Pass as base layer to
build upon also provides us with a true guide for
shadow-casting and the ability to push the realism of
our scene further. By carefully integrating photographic
assets with illustrated elements, we can simulate light
propagation across different materials in a very
realistic manner. Highlights and rim lights can be used
to push items back or forward into space. To obtain a
more interesting and readable set of values we
distribute objects in a way that maintains an alternating
pattern of glossy and flat surfaces.03
COLOURS AND PERSPECTIVE
Once the shot is set we start refining colours,
textures and the overall mood of our scene. We wanted to
portray a dark and gritty Tokyo back-alley, but with vibrant
colours and a surreal contrast; to obtain this we combined
grungy textures with very bright and dreamy tints. The
contrast created by visual elements such as trashcans,
dirt, graffiti, [as well as] cracks in the concrete and the vivid
yellow tints of a bright afternoon sunlight over a deep blue
sky, generate the very unique result we were after.06
HYPER SURREALISM
The general mood of Project Tengu X is
characterised by extensive use of bright colours and
surreal lighting, combined with rather violent scenes or
action sequences and grotesque characters. We aim
therefore to create a visual language that can transcend
the uniqueness of the story, combining a highly saturated
anime-style colour palette with photorealistic textures and
a detail oriented western console game aesthetic. This
approach allows us to amplify the dark humor of the IP
and immediately convey the unique tone of the story to
the viewer. We call this ‘hyper surrealism’.