Game Art Highlight

Whenever I encounter something(s) that is visually compelling in a game I’m going to quickly talk about it and how it applies to the development of games here at Flashbang. I’m going to kick it off with the new Prince Of Persia on Xbox 360/PC.

Anyone who has seen the game either in screenshots or in motion know that it is extremely stylized. While I think they achieved something really cool, what really struck me was their use of plain old pretty traditional art, specifically on the title screen, menu screen, and in this promotional movie. If you look closely at the elements involved in both the menus and that movie, you’ll notice that they didn’t actually use any 3d models. Instead they used flat conceptual paintings in 3d space to communicate vivid and complex scenes like one does in storyboards, or in constructing environments for stage and traditional theater.

I think this is clever because they achieved beauty with 3d depth without taking the oodles of time it takes to create character models and animation. Not that there is anything at all wrong or uneffective about creating these kind of assets for your title and/or menu scenes, it’s just that the time it takes to do so isn’t appropriate for our self-imposed 8 week development cycle. With 3d assets you are creating the model itself, a texture, and possibly a rig and animations for it as well. With this technique you are just essentially just making textures and then applying more fundamental animations to them in real time. Bending, swaying, deforming, rotating…these are things that the objects in Prince Of Persia’s title and menu scenes appear to do. They also employed a neat post processing effect which overlays a texture over everything, and they also created a particle system which generates those mystical blue ashes. This exact particle system is common throughout the game, which introduces some aesthetic unity and tightens up the game as an aesthetic package. A delicious art package. For your brain mouth. :)