Hey there, it's Serena here! This week we’re giving you a little look at some of our early concept art and art tests. 

Aesthetics

We knew we wanted to make the game in a 3d low-poly style but it’s also important to us that it stands out stylistically from other low-poly games. So the first thing we did was create some mood boards to get our creativity flowing! 

This first board is just to get an idea of the style we’re going for, with some relatively hard gradient colour and soft, cozy lighting. We're also visualizing the camera angle you'll be seeing everything at. 

With that in mind we created another mood board to get ideas for the our character's house! This would let us get to work on an art test to put all our ideas together. As you can see we leaned heavily on the cottage-core side for the test, but we would like to add more of a sci-fi feel to the final version.

Concept Art

Now for the fun parts; designing and drawing the art for the 3D work! Here’s a very short time lapse showing the different designs we went through before getting to the current (not final) version of the main dome:

At first we played around with different shapes - mainly round, clean and uniform shapes we see associated with space - but then decided to go for a more traditional look. While the house looks more earthy, we thought it would add to the sci-fi elements more if we hinted at parts of the house being made from scraps of an old ship. 

Next we created the 3D render of the current house and tried out a couple of different styles to see what might work. We made a version with the hard gradient style that we talked about before and another version with a softer, more painterly look. Since we liked both we’re going to try blending the two styles.  

That’s it for now but before we go, here’s a preview of some possible character designs!

Want to know more about how we came up with the ideas for this game in general? Check out our last post! Or, for a more detailed sneak peak into our design process, take a look at our next post and see how we went about designing plant stats and crossbreeding for the botany system!

- Serena

Mood board image credits: 

Jar of Space- https://sketchfab.com/hayden8or/models

Castle image - Vue.js

Pokemon XY - GameFreak, Nintendo, TPCi, Creatures inc.

Ooblets - Glumberland 

Fairy tale house - jennibxx on redbubble

Hedgebrook cottage- Tom Marks

John Tanner interiors

Fairy tale cottage- Micheal Viani and Redfin Corp

Summer Cottage - Summer house cottage rentals

Image 6 - Unknown Source- tumblr user nature-punks