Comments on: The New SpyParty Environment Art Style

By: Quirken

Quirken — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 19:32:18 +0000

A little late to the game, I know, but wanted to say this looks amazing, and I think the idea to separate by palette rather than dark/light is a really clever idea. Gorgeous too!

By: checker

checker — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 03:05:47 +0000

They’re going to be colored. All the active areas are going to be saturated colors for visibility. Hopefully it won’t ruin the aesthetic, but gameplay first! :)

By: Wasco

Wasco — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:58:07 +0000

These are beautiful. I’m curious about your plans for the bookshelves on Traditional. Are they going to be color-coded like in the current maps, or would that ruin the aesthetic?

By: wheeeetom

wheeeetom — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 05:00:14 +0000

I had the same thought kovrizhka!

It’s so refreshing to see games with such strong thought put into their overall aesthetic, rather than simply trying to push graphics hardware to the limit and ending up with endless, repetitive brown and grey environments.

By: kovrizhka

kovrizhka — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:32:33 +0000

Very impressive work. I genuinely enjoy the fact that new maps are still incredibly clean and uncluttered, being as detailed as they are.

(Shift from detailed textures to pure shapes and shading is reminiscent of the style they have chosen for The Witness — coincidence? :)

By: checker

checker — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 21:28:55 +0000

It’s mostly getting the other characters in. We’re about to start on the next five, but it’ll be a while. After there are enough characters to make a real level, we’ll tune up Modern and the animations. Traditional is going to be a while, just because it’s only concept art right now.

By: checker

checker — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 21:27:20 +0000

Yeah, we’re going to do different colors, for sure, but will stick with the warm/cool separation…the Sniper needs the message that they’re out there in the cold. :) But, the other thing to remember is the characters are the stars, and they’ll have all kinds of colorful outfits (even though the current set are pretty brown and grey).

By: Constantine

Constantine — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 20:58:44 +0000

Yea… Make it teal :D
These two levels have same color palette, if all the levels will have it the eyes will tire…

By: Naveen

Naveen — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 19:36:28 +0000

Hey. Before my question, I must praise John. Most beautiful game ever. Especially when you’re playing it and there are all these guests that look lively and I have jazz music playing from youtube or the dozens of jazz albums my dad has.

Do you have an estimate for when Traditional will be released, even if in an early stage like Modern is right now. What work is there left to do to Modern to get to it being playable, and likewise, what more work is there for the rest of Modern, so that the level is fully opened up? Is it simply a matter of modelling and animating the other characters?

By: checker

checker — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 19:16:33 +0000

Right now it’s all in photoshop, and mostly by hand, sometimes with overlay layers and masks. You can do ramps and stuff using the baked AO in masks controlling the different colors, but for the concepts we just sort of hand-painted a lot of it to get the feel we wanted, which made it a royal pain to iterate. Then we emulated that in the textures for the realtime stuff, but we don’t have it quite right yet as you can see in the video. We need to get a full pipeline in place so that we can have it just dump out the different maps and not need to touch it up manually, but it’s going to be a while. I still need to figure out how much runtime lighting we need, versus what can be baked.