The Fine Line Between Honest and Evil Comics by Salty Vixen
The Free Realms Filter
1. The FREE REALMS Filter:
Creating and Maintaining an Art Style
Across all Media
Rosie Rappaport
Sebastian Strzalkowski
2. INTRODUCTION
• Style
– gives a game its identity
• Consistency
– Ties identity to all media
• Commitment
– Ensures consistency of style across all
departments
3. Pre-production
• Define the style: 2D and 3D
Production
• Build and iterate
• Keep the team and everyone else on style
Post Production
• Continuing Support
• Continued Content Creation
6. Concepting
• Concept art is a critical element in developing
consistency within the game. Maintain flexibility
and willingness on the team for resets and
redo's
• Goal - to develop a "style filter" that can be
applied to anything to make it look consistent
with the game.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define the
terms of look and feel
7. Types of Concept Art
Concept art and building out
• establish silhouette, form language and line for
all assets (show examples)
• environment paintings- establish style through
color palettes, textures, and shapes (show
examples)
• Character development (show examples for
concept to completion)
13. Building and Iterating - Slices
• Build
• Review
• Check point with stakeholders to
recalibrate goals
• Iteration (Focus and Polish) – being
flexible, each time going forward
take a small risk,
Acknowledge constant risks and
failings, moving forward based on
successes
32. Building and Iterating – The Whole Pie
• Daily sub team meeting for schedule progress review and questions.
All completed assets are then reviewed and approved or returned to
the artist with noted changes. (DevTrack and Bulletin Board)
– Daily sub team meetings
– Scrum card reviews
– Weekly reviews
• Iteration – being flexible, each time going forward take a small risk,
acknowledge constant risks and failings, moving forward based on
successes
• Check point with stakeholders to recalibrate goals
– Scrum + Devtrack
37. Collaboration with External Stakeholders
• Development of Key Art - Collaboration with Ad Agency
to use the established style to develop branding building
blocks which are then integrated into the game.
• Embedded marketing artist
– Embedded artists from other departments sit with the
Dev team and take direction from the Art Director
• Development of website, collaboration with web
developers (show examples)
• Embedded web dev artist
54. Trading Card Game
Development of Trading Cards
The style of the individual artist should shine
through but also conform to the "style filter“
color, line weight and character and environment
portrayal
Style guides and thorough feedback on the roughs
and finals
61. Becoming more hands off
• Investment in keeping the art style consistent
through feedback and approval process during
previous phases ensures other departments can
now move forward with clear understanding of
key elements that keep the style consistent.
62. Successes
• Large team with a unified vision of style
– “MMORPG Quote”
• Consistent style gave artists tools that
encouraged creativity and innovation
• Commitment to style provided common goal
• Developed strong and trusting work
relationships
