next Nvidia graphic card, but the big advantage is that we can create any new asset in a minimum amount of time. This is of course a big
advantage on the overall budget, but also gives way more freedom to our game and level designers, who can way more easily request any new asset if needed.
WHAT WERE THE ART TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES USED DURING DEVELOPMENT? We wanted to keep this as simple as possible, so we didn’t really use some crazy new techniques to create our assets. Most of our 3d assets were created in Maya, as well as all the rigging and animations. All the animations were all made with the most basic keyframe technic.
The 2D assets used for the interface and the textures of the assets were produced directly in Photoshop. Again, we just mainly used the easiest methods possible (all textures where just hand painted on tablet). Once imported in-game, we’ve then taken advantage of some of the powerful tools given by Unreal 4, to give more life and cohesion to these assets. Some important work was then made on the lighting and special effects, to enhance the overall feeling of our art and give it its final look. We’ve heard a lot of people talking about cell-shading techniques when evocating Weird West, but this isn’t the case. Cell-shading is a different technique that could have been helpful if we wanted to keep this first vision of strong pure black shadows, but in our current case, we are just using regular bouncing lighting on simple flat hand drawn textures (with a few differences for specific parts, but that is just the exception). Lighting is then used as a complement, by adjusting the saturation of some key
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colors of theses textures, depending of the amount of light received and/or the mood that we want for a specific location.
WERE THERE ANY UNEXPECTED DIFFICULTIES? Not really on the art side itself, but more because of the evolution of the game during its development. The most critical point was the update on the camera position. Weird West was first envisioned as a real-time top-down
shooter, with a camera always locked in position and rotation, and far away from the player. But with the first visually appealing render tests, the whole team wanted to see more than just a top-down view of the world that we were creating. The camera was lowered, we added the ability to change the inclination of it, to zoom in, and more besides.
This also meant that we had to switch to more detailed models for our 3d characters and environments, and more detailed textures. But it was really worth it. Even if the workload for the artists was increased, we still managed to keep it in an acceptable state. Sure, creating a new more detailed 3d chair would perhaps now take four hours instead of two, but it’s still very quick for us to produce.
HOW DIFFERENT DOES THE RELEASED GAME LOOK FROM HOW IT WAS ENVISIONED? If we are really considering the first vision of the game, it was supposed to be a pure top-down game with 2D animated sprites only. But this vision was really quickly put to the side, as soon as we’ve made our first internal test. It was clear that switching to simplified 3D art wouldn’t
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