THE GAME HAS AN OBVIOUS PAINTERLY, GRAPHIC NOVEL INFLUENCE; WHY WAS THE DECISION MADE TO LEAN INTO THAT AESTHETIC (AND WHAT WERE THE DANGERS)? It was possible for us to share several big advantages: We are fans of graphic adventures, and our small art team has backgrounds in creating comic arts and/or animated novels. We wanted something that could stay appealing over time, especially in a world where realistic rendering is just increasing really quickly. Stylized in game art ages better than realistic art. We also wanted to be able to create a whole world, with a very limited art team, so it was important to be able to quickly create any asset.
The main danger is that some people can be turned off by a specific visual style, and qualifies the game as being old school. In the same vein, some people love pixel art, others really dislike it. You won’t please everyone, so this wasn’t a big deal for us.
WHAT WERE YOUR INFLUENCES, AND HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT THAT WEIRD WEST WAS VISUALLY DISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE MEDIA THAT HAS INFORMED IT? We took a bit of several influences at the beginning of the development of the game, and were hesitating between a visual style with a lot of pure black shadows and heavy flat saturated colors (Chris Bourassa, Mike Mignola ), or
a more European comic style (Yves Swolf, Régis Loisel, Jean Giraud, Benoit Dellac ). The latest references were the ones that we found more appealing pretty quickly, and the strong pure black shadows were abandoned. It also appeared that what can work well as a static image on a book, can be hard to read for gameplay, so we’ve also progressively refined the art to make it more adapted for a game.
HOW MUCH OF A DEPARTURE WAS WEIRD WEST FROM THE PREVIOUS TITLES YOU’VE WORKED ON? Weird West is on the opposite side of the spectrum for asset complexities. We went from high resolution polygonal models created in ZBrush with several layers of materials (texture map, normal maps, reflection map…) that we were doing in our previous productions (Dark Messiah, Dishonored, Prey), to some low polygonal meshes with a single hand draw texture. As an easy comparison, creating a new creature or human model for Dishonored or Prey was taking several weeks (even several months for some), but only two to three days for Weird West. Animation production was also completely simplified, as we came back to the most basic form of skeletal deformation for our meshes. No need to create some complex rig system and spend months to have a perfect lip sync and facial animations, and no need to create physics simulation for our character’s hair. Sure, we probably won’t be a good technology trademark for the
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