Time Donkey Artistic Influences

It’s a pleasure to formally announce that Time Donkey is the next Blurst game! As most of you know, it started out as a small prototype Steve made a couple months back. His initial vision was far more cartoon inspired than it was realistically inspired, which struck a personal chord with me as my natural preferences for game aesthetics are along these lines. Steve ended up taking care of (what I perceive to be) the natural first step and established the influences. He told me wants it to resemble both Wind Waker on the Gamecube and a personal project I had worked on previously. We also ended up having a useful conversation about the vibrant and stylized platformers of recent years, i.e. Jak And Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Prince Of Persia, etc.

In order to clearly communicate how I thought it should look to the rest of the team, I formally narrowed it down to three specific influences: Windwaker on Gamecube, Zack And Wiki on Wii, and Lost Winds on WiiWare.

Zack And Wiki on Wii is a great product to look at right now not only because it’s modern, but it’s a great example of how to super-saturate everything and still look really neat. The plant life is particularly inspiring because it’s abundant, charming, and stands out on top of the ground it’s all buried in. The only thing working against Zack And Wiki is that the overall spectrum of color is so varied that it can get quite over stimulating. Not always, but enough so that I found it distracting. In any case, it’s a great looking product that helped me calibrate our color usage.

Lost Winds on WiiWare is a fantastic looking 3d sidescroller in the vein of Zack And Wiki. It’s another very useful example of a modern platformer covered in sexy. Generally speaking, I found the Lost Winds palette a little more digestable than Zack And Wiki’s. The color spectrum (per area) is a much closer together but the game still manages to be vibrant. Ultimately, Lost Winds helped me further calibrate our color usage and on top of that, helped me calibrate our amount of textural detail; Lost Winds has a little bit more texture detail than we want.

Wind Waker on GameCube. Ahhh, sweet sweet Wind Waker. As far as I’m concerned, one of the most successful attempts at making a game look like a traditional piece of cartoon animation, plus a whole lot more. The thing that has always stuck out to me the most about Wind Waker is its inherent harmony. Nothing really fights with each other and nothing is so saturated it pressurizes your eyeballs. Both the HUD and the characters are distinguishable from the environment without looking out of place. It’s still more saturated than most games, but its range of saturation is small enough to keep everything held together. I find it particularly interesting that no individual object has a ton of contrast and does not contain more than 2 or 3 major color values. At the end of the day I feel this is the primary distinguishing attribute of the Wind Waker’s aesthetic, which is probably why it achieves the harmony it does. It’s much easier to make a modest handful of colors look good next to each other than it is to make, I dunno, the 600 colors on screen in most games. ;)

Furthermore, we’ve been using a dedicated concept artist on this project. He’s a local artist named Justin Messner who’s been spending a couple days a week with us creating the kind of really cool images we don’t normally have the time to create ourselves. So far it’s worked out really great and his imagery has been helpful and inspiring. Here’s one of his pieces!

That’s all for now; we’ll start offloading more art as things become more developed. So far everything is coming together really well and I think we’ve got something more refined than anything you’ve seen from us before…