Jan Berende
Veneficium is a game made by Frostpetal Studios. The 3D platformer was made for a minor in Game Design & Development where we worked in a team of fifteen people. Within that team I worked as Art Director with a team of four other artists.
My tasks included overseeing the art style of the game, texturing, creating islands, designing environments, making promotional material for social media, making the trailer for the game and creating a pipeline to easily incorporate and re-use assets within the levels.
If you're curious to try out the game for yourself you can download it for free on itch.io or Steam.
At the start of the project the look of our game was still rather unclear. We knew what we wanted to make but without a clear view it was hard to visualize. On the left you see a few of the drawings I made to communicate what we were going for. Throughout the project I made a lot of quick, short sketches as a form of communication to convey ideas and structures.
At first we figured that getting into texturing would be too big of a hurdle with our limited time and experience. Until we stumled upon the idea of using gradients as textures. It adds a lot of flavour to the world, it's quick to make and (as we later discovered) very easy to reproduce as alternate colour palettes. The gradients could also be used to subtly add a little extra communication to our environment. Note the lighter tip of the arrow sign for example.
As art director I created environment concepts and kept the art style in check. We worked in a low poly style with artists new to 3D modeling so in order to make sure everything fit a clear set of rules and good communication were important. Thankfully everyone worked hard and had a good grasp of our requirements, which made redoing work a rarity.
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In order to reuse assets without having to manually texture everything a second time I set up a pipeline where colliders were first put on the blank models, then textures were applied in different folders. This way if our design team had to adjust a collider or other presets, they could do it without interfering with the existing props in each level. While at the same time the art team could implement a different colour palette per level. It took a lot of restructuring and writing to get it all clear and ready. But it was 100% worth it.
Finally there was the promotion. We made regular updates on both Instagram and Twitter. Often I would stream on our studio's Twitch channel as well to show people the making of our game. It made a good and productive way to get to know the community and get new people interested. Aside from that, I got to make the key art for Veneficium as well as this little new year's artwork.
Humans Please is a 2D mobile game made by Firepetal Studios. We worked as a team of 5 people. I was one of the two artists responsible for creating visuals for the game.
I created the colour palette, oversaw the style, designed the protagonist, various obstacles, the main menu, the backgrounds, various animations, the banner and the trailer for the game.
If you're curious to try out the game for yourself you can download it for free in the Play Store.
Alle video's
Animations for Zonk upon getting hit, grabbing a powerup or being defeated.
For Humans Please we started off with the design of our playable character Zonk. We started off with a standard alien look and attuned the colours until it looked the way we wanted. After that we based all other colours and designs around Zonk to make sure the ship is always visible despite the amount of obstacles. Then it was a matter of making a colour palette for the rest and sticking to it.
We wanted our menu to look retro but still somewhat futuristic. So to support the idea that you're playing as an alien who's trying to gather humans we kept our interface close to our main character's colours.
