Working with clean and abstracted shapes,colors and gradients does't mean your visuals are simple, for me it means they are a readable open canvas to expand upon with technical art.

I think as game artists we're always chasing some imaginary horizon. Beyond that horizon are words like "better graphics" or" next gen" or "photo realism". Words that at some point I stopped caring for. For the last five years I've been on the downward slope of a parabolic creative trajectory where instead of going up and wanting "more" I now want "less".

And the culmination of that journey is, that I now prefer to create game art in very peculiar way. Art that doesn't need to be wrapped in pixels and can just be what it is. Simple models that forego textures and normal maps and usually only have some vertex colors. Simple geometry with which I can start crafting inside my chosen engine and applying layers of what's regularly called technical art.

Strangely I love lighting and moodiness in game art, so don't read this as a game artists that wants to go "low poly". Or a programmer that wants a simple art he can create himself.

Escaping a box.

The game art I make is sometimes ridiculously over engineered or impractical, and I am foremost an artist and designer. But a designer with a technical base and one that has put himself under strict limitations as a creative challenge and jumping off point. Limitations which aren't always clear to myself, but of which the lack of textures for instance is an important but not the only limiting requirement. I also tend also try to break stuff and find strange new solutions to sometimes simple problems.

Where it started

This all started in 2013 after the Moonpath to Elsweyr MOD for Skyrim. Creating custom art for the Skyrim engine was such a chore and I was looking for an easy and efficient art style to develop by myself for my game Oberon's Court. At at some point I created this visual by near accident and it set me on an interesting nearly 5 year journey:





Here was a world I had created with only geometry and some fairly simple shaders. But filled with a few tricks to make it stand out from the general low poly styling that other people where developing at the time. No flat shading or edges where I didn't want them. It was about creases and mountain sides created with the least amount of complexity I could get away with and still achieve a mood and setting I wanted. It basically blew my mind.

Mostly its about carefully modeled surfaces that allows for angular edges and smooth surfaces which are then highlighted through different shading effects. This clean modelling technique allowed me to create worlds, buildings and inhabitants without having to focus on detail, yet with enough depth and plasticity to create very subtle and diverse moods through color and lighting.

This clean look has forced me to explore the use of colors and contrast in whole new ways, which working with photo realism didn't require me to do as much. Now if I didn't find the colors I needed and the shading to contrast and and compliment them it would look horrible, and when I hit the right mixture it would look great. This journey has led me to new challenges over a number of games.

Another example was the game Rekt! (iOS) for which I was asked to do the technical art last year. Here the game already had a slick 3D world and vehicles which needed something beyond modelling cleanliness. I chose to take the static arena models and create dynamic color cycles based on the state of the game and projected on the world's colors. And by coding the colors directly and generating the palette through contrasting and complimentary colors in the shaders.

When you are diving into technical art you start to view a visual , a world or a scene no longer as a set of separate objects, but rather a single connected entity you want to control precisely. For instance for Rekt! I wanted every aspect of the visuals to respond to the game play, and I created a color/shader controller script that managed every aspect of the visual look. This allowed for the colors to change based on game-play modes and player interaction. But to do this you can no longer allow for assets and visuals to "break" your control. And technical art becomes a challenge to constrain the amount of variables to something you can still manage and tweak by eye. At least for myself.

In a game under construction at Little Chicken Game Company I expanded on this method of controlling shaders and colors to create full stylized day/night cycles for pseudo procedural city generation:

Recently I began work on a solo project once more, after having put Oberon's Court on Ice I needed something more modest of scope. And something that would combine all the technical art tricks I had been amassing in previous projects. This became the Falconeer, and it started from a simple exercise in creating a simple seaside vista.

From that simple scene sprung an entire world of texture free , simple and clean geometry that feels as handmade as I could have it while still feeling like an actual place.





The Falconeer isn't just about technical art in the shading and lighting of its worlds, it also contains a mass off animations and effects created from code which is the other major aspect of technical art in games. Inside these worlds you need to have interaction, animation and liveliness.

This is the topic of the Part 2 off this Article: Breathing life through code.