Positronic Dreams

Lately I’ve been putting some thought on a visual style for our iPhone game and I am trying to figure out how to explain my thoughts on this topic in words. I’m not an artist but an observer of design. My approach to this is as follows:

• A visual style must be cohesive and true to itself. Both in terms of colors, style(not sure if this is the right word, but for example clean lines versus a more complex lines, what is difference between different art styles of realism versus icon).
• Game Art isn’t Art as Games have a commercial purpose. This makes Game Art closer to Product Design. Pop art if I am correct and I remember my art history courses.
• What mood are you trying to achieve? Darker colors = Dark moods. More pastel color (i.e. new age) give you a ‘happier’ tone. Horror games can be dark and foreboding. Casual games have to be cheerful and uplifting because you play them to relax.
• Do you want your game to be different? Notice I use the word different here rather than unique. I don’t believe that anything is truly unique is visual styling. The reasons are two fold. A truly unique style has 2 immediate reactions. Either you will ‘like’ it or you will ‘hate’ it. The second reason  is that I believe thinking you can come up with a new unique style in product with a 6 month development cycle is a waste of time. People spend their whole lifes trying to figure out their groove.
• Branding and IP. Characters and a strong theme usually help reinforce recognition. This works with my prior point about cohesiveness but more in the fact what your ‘intent’ is to be able to also try to both differentiate your game from the others, establish a ‘world’ that could be commerically turned into multiple products. I am sure there are more qualified people online who talk about brand recognition etc..I argue that you need to establish certain brand with your product that isn’t necessarily built around your gameplay mechanics but establish a reusable style. Taking a generic approach to this will leave your Game ultimately forgettable. What you want to do is try by way of color, characters, ’style’ and flow to make your game ’stick’ in the players mind.
• Attraction. With the huge amout of games out there right now, you have to think about how to ‘attract’ a player to you game. Knowing a little about your target market will help you choose the appeal. Alot of people call this a ‘pop’. I hate Art Directors who say that. The word game we are working on right covers a fairly large spectrum of English speakers from Scrabble afficionadoes to Kids Spelling Bee types.

At the end of the day, I would go for a strong IP driven theme, if I could. It’s nice to think about the ability to change your wallpaper, skins etc but that only works IMHO on something you use alot(i.e. computer, phones, chat ,browsers). Our game, as popular as we may want it to be is probably going to be played 1-5% of the time on their iPhone so having the ability to ’skin’ things might not work as well.

Rather than just finishing Honor and Money, we are thinking about widening the platforms for it just so that we can explore those marketplaces. Unity3D has recently launched a windows version of their Game Development Software and I have been kicking the tires for a while. The big question is if Unity3D can be used to replace what has been done so far in Torque.

Although the port to TGEA is going well, there is a fair amount of rework especially on the way game data was being handled. So looking at Unity with the possibility of porting to the Wii and the iPhone seems like a good idea. Although Torque provides a Wii version as well and an iPhone, the amount of work required looks more significant simply because how many ‘different versions’ of Torque there are.