The Hypothetical Adventure Game

[Blambo]

I've been noodling around with ideas for settings and stories for an adventure game that I'd have no time or resources to make, so I figured that I might log the little concept arts that I've collected for it here, maybe to possibly serve as inspiration for other people.

 

They're usually just doodles and stuff that I've found myself doing. I went back on some recently and found that they're composed pretty similarly to adventure game screens and scenes, so thought it'd be a fun exercise to make paintings with the limitation that a classic adventure game character can walk through them.

 

Thumbnails and ideas, updated regularly:

 

 

I liked the forest fishing village, so I started painting it:

 

 

Perhaps not worth a thread, but I wanted to use up some room in this swanky new subforum we've got here.

[Joewintergreen]

It looks like you have some pretty cool/solid ideas. Totally pick up game maker or AGS or something and try to make it a thing, even if you just use those same doodles you have here as the actual backgrounds in the game.

[BigJKO]

I really like what you've got so far! Them concepts look good. Yeah, go make like.. one scene in AGS or Unity, using that as the background. Get some interaction up and running.

[Blambo]

Thanks! I checked out adventure game studio. It seems like about as complex as I need for this kind of thing, though I'm totally in the blue sky phase right now.

 

I've colored the dock screen. Might continue painting out this whole area, make it like a village at the base of a huge tree:

 

[Oky]

That colored version looks really nice. I could see myself pointing and clicking my way through that.

[Blambo]

Thanks!

 

Detailed the dock area, definitely time to move on:

[Joewintergreen]

Okay you're actually excitingly good at that

[BigJKO]

Yes! Please make this interactive. I want to walk around in that, right now, please.

[Blambo]

Thank you! I want to map out and design at least two more sections of that town before I do any interactions, and definitely to figure out AGS a little more.

[GyCot]

Fantastic painted vibe.  I would love to see small layered animations where brushstrokes paint over the trees in real time and give it a "wind rustle" / "being painted" look.  GAH very rad.

[Blambo]

That would be cool, especially considering the fact that the leaves were like...slapped on at the end 

 

Final pass on the second thumbnail. It's a library built super high up on the giant tree:

 

[Joewintergreen]

I love that one and I love how fast you're pumping this shit out

[Blambo]

With questionable quality, haha. I think it should be pretty fast if I'm doing storyboard thumbnails, sorting them, enlarging and painting them, though it's kind of hard to tell how much I should be polishing them.

 

EDIT: and this method is incredibly disastrous if this is the art pipeline for a real game, considering the fact that I'm not working off of any written structure

[Joewintergreen]

I'm doing a similar thing. Hashtag yolo swag 420 blazeit.

[Blambo]

 

All hail the space mushrooms!

[voxn]

I really like these! Always glad to see art

 

if your looking for criticism:

- your saturation is too low, which can happen when you work up from greyscale. 

- shapes are a bit muddy. Clean up edges and work out brushstrokes with visible opacity to solve this. You could try using the lasso tool to block out initial shapes as it gives perfect edges right off the bat.

- dial up the atmospheric perspective to push foregrounds into attention. If you drop a black layer on top of your painting & change the layer setting to 'saturation' it allows you to really easily take a look at the values.

 

the library is probably the strongest image so far, because the man made structures forced you to use really clean shapes + hard edged lines

 

keep it up!

[Blambo]

Thanks for the criticism! Those are all really good points.

 

-Yeah I'm trying to figure out my value balance before I plan any colors, so I do a greyscale thumbnail and overlay colors later. I think I read somewhere that most objects on average have about 60% saturation in natural light, which is way above anything in especially the third painting.

-Hm I never thought about tightening up shapes early on, I usually figure that I could always tighten up later (I usually forget).

-That's a great idea. The first and third painting really do seem to lack spatial depth.

 

I think I'm gonna do another pass on the spaceships, which I think is probably the weakest one here, and tighten up the first one. Thanks so much for the tips!

[voxn]

sure! and I guess I can post this; I started lassoing things and color adjusting etc but I went too quickly and things turned out a bit muddly / the highlights went nuclear -- so its not a great example, but it shows a little of what I was talking about

 

 

no actual painting! Just cranking up the saturation, pulling the colors towards yellow/green, fogging the background a bit and adding some lights with a brush set to color dodge

[Blambo]

I did something similar, though I didn't want to lose the dullness in some areas:

 

 

Also brought out the reds and pushed back the middle ground in the spaceship scene. I also cleaned it up a little:

 

 

EDIT: I did a "vibrance" pass on the dock, and it looks...interesting. I think it's like increasing the saturation but it avoids certain colors. Either way I could be a lot more bold with colors where appropriate in the future:

 

 

I think I might keep the original, or some medium between the original and this because I at least like that the relatively saturated plant life contrasts with the other elements.

 

However, an overall saturation increase was justified in the spaceship scene because it was just so grey.

 

EDIT 2: I feel like the best way to approach these in the future is the way I approached the library. Greyscale thumbnail to colored thumbnail to shapes to detail, rather than greyscale thumbnail to shapes and some detail to color to detail, probably lets me be appropriately conservative with colors while not being too scared to lay them down because of the amount of detail I've already spent on the greyscale.

[feelthedarkness]

just paint maps with total abandon then figure out what the game is trying to say after that. 

 

also, spectacular work!

[voxn]

interesting, vibrance is basically color-biased saturation created to let you crank up the saturation on photos without making people glow fake-tan orange. 

 

those look better though! Since you seem to be a in drawing mood you might try designing some pictures from the ground up with walkable spaces in mind. It could be an interesting challenge that'd keep it more game-centric rather then pure concept art.

[Blambo]

Yeah, actually right you caught me painting a path to the town center (which I'll design later, as it probably requires me to design the branches from that hub) that passes through a sort of marketplace:

 

 

It's sort of just a straight line right now, and I'm counting on the marketplace having potential interactions to justify its inclusion.

 

It also provides another shot of the big mushroom in the background, which'll definitely be an explorable place.

 

(Also I'm aware of the stupidity of using that many torches in a village with primarily thatch roofing. Maybe they all use firefly jars or something)

[Ben X]

This is probably massively premature, but let me know if you want help bashing out some story/puzzle/structure ideas, or with dialogue writing or whatevs.

[Blambo]

Oooh that would be awesome! I have zero plans for any of that right now, so I'm just doing handfuls of scenes from specific settings. But It'd be cool to start thinking about some stories!

 

I'd like this to be a bit of a public project, so if you have anything feel free to post em here.

[voxn]

firefly jars are fully rad