The visual style and theme of my animation and the artwork in it is massively inspired by a series of games I used to play from when I was a teen until now. All of these games fall into the same genre of games which is usually a sort of time consuming or 'time wasting' games where the main theme is usually centred around something that seems like everyday life and an addiction to collecting items.
This specific theme of gaming will be described in more detail as I talk about the visual style of the following games that inspire my animation.
Harvest Moon Series
The Harvest Moon games have been around since 1996 and follow a re-occurring theme of farm simulation and role playing game where you start off playing as a character (in which you can name and choose the gender of) who has moved into a new town to work and live as a farmer. The farm that you move into is bare, small and has no farm animals or crops, only a house and some fields with poor soil. The entire town is also in poor condition and has few villagers and has been this way since the death of what is known as the harvest tree and the Harvest goddess who looked after the tree and the land around the town. The harvest tree withered due to the villagers not taking care of the town and nature and taking the tree for granted (as if they were creating co2 emissions) by littering, cutting down trees etc.
Throughout the game your goal as a farmer is to revive the harvest goddess and bring life back to your town and the farm by growing your own crops, using fertilisers to make the fields on your farm richer, building your own coop and barn for livestock and poultry and shipping produce made on the farm. You can also socialise with the villagers and your character can even marry one of the bachelors or bachelorettes by building up their hearts. As the condition of the town improve during the time it takes for you to revive the harvest goddess more people move into the town and more areas of the island open up for you to explore.
I love the art style for this game because they use simple colours and textures and it has a cute visual. This makes the characters and the overall style of the game seem friendly which is what I want my animation to look like. Rather than an intimidating message with an accusing tone or making the issue seem like something that is incredibly serious I want it to reach out to the viewers with more of a friendly message or offer for a better future. The colour scheme is also very earthy and fresh because they don't use any bold striking colours such as hot pink or other luminous colours. The design of my eco friendly character for my animation will be similar to the style of the characters in this game. Unlike the rest of my animation which has a collage kind of style my character will resemble this style more as I want her to stand out against the patterned elements and not get lost within all the other objects in the animation.
Rune Factory Frontier
Rune Factory is another series of games who's art style inspires me. The concept behind the Rune Factory games are very similar to Harvest Moon's as both games are made by the same company except Rune Factory has fantasy themed twist throughout the games and includes more fantasy themed aspects to it. For example this game keeps the same idea of farming and revival of the land except you can also go to areas such as forests and dungeons and fight monsters as well as capture ones that can be raised and trained as livestock on your farm. There's also the fantasy element of different races of humanoids such as elves, humans and witches and wizards. The Producer of Harvest Moon and Rune Factory describes this game as "Harvest Moon where you wield a sword."
What I like about the artwork from both harvest moon and Rune factory is that they make the whole farming idea a big theme and there's always imagery of crops and plants which relates to the idea of my animation of growing your own food. I also like how in this particular image the whole outer edge of the group of characters and food have a stroke of brown cork or wooden texture instead of just a thick outline of a solid colour. I may use this idea in my own animation to outline maybe my eco friendly character or the vegetables that are growing as I think this little detail looks very organic and unique. The art style in both games is very much like manga or anime style artwork which has always been a big influence on my drawing style although I think for this animation i'm more drawn to the less proportionate and detailed style of the harvest moon characters which look short chubby and have round faces with simple face expressions as I think that style would be easier and quicker to draw and goes better with the collage theme of the rest of my animation. I really like the detail in this style with the colouring such as on the crops ,the textures are soft and I like how on the strawberries they use patches of lighter and darker reds to make it look like it has that bumpy texture a strawberry has from having loads of seeds indented into it. I also like how they used a similar technique on the corn and grapes instead of outlining every individual grape or corn and using the colours to define the texture and shape of the food instead.
Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing is another game I used to play which follows a similar time wasting, life or community simulation themed game. Unlike Harvest Moon and Rune Factory which centres around farming and nurturing the environment, Animal Crossing is more of a game about collecting. The player lives in a village inhabited by talking animals that live their lives as if they were humans, carrying out various activities. The series is unique for its open-ended gameplay and progress forward using real time gameplay (use of the game systems' internal clock and calendar to simulate real passage of time).
I think the art style in this game would probably be more appealing if my animation was more aimed at children as the characters are more simply drawn and have a more humorous look to them because they have weird facial expressions. The colour palette is also extremely bright and uses shocking 'in your face' colours like neon green and orange and bright blue, this kind of colour palette would likely appeal more to children though for my animation I would like to use a more muted and earthy colour palette for that organic and eco friendly look. Though I can agree that this game probably has the easiest art style to replicate and re draw I'm not sure if it will work with my theme and against the collaged patterned elements in the rest of my animation. On the other hand the Animal Crossing series has taken my interest in their original sound tracks so I'm most likely to use a soundtrack from one of the games as an option for the background music in my own animation.
Ragnarok Battle Offline
Ragnarok Battle Offline, or RBO, is a 'beat 'em up' game for Microsoft Windows, It is a homage and spoof of an online RPG game I used to play called Ragnarok Online. This game is a much different theme and genre compared to the 3 games above which were all life simulation games but the art style of this game has some similar features to the ones above. Ragnarok Battle is a multiplayer fantasy fighting game where you pick to play as a character out of 7 job classes (Novice, Magician, Archer, Acolyte, Swordsman, Thief and Merchant) and advance through levels by yourself or with 3 other players, killing monsters collecting money and dropped items and fighting bosses.
What I like about this art style is it looks quite similar to the harvest moon style with the short chubby and round faced look but looks more 2D and has a simpler way of drawing the faces and facial expressions, I don't like the look of the big ears though so I won't include that as part of the style of my eco friendly character if I decide to draw inspiration from this game's art style. I may combine the style of Harvest Moon with the style of Ragnarok such as using the same body style and colouring style from Harvest Moon but using the faces from the characters of Rangarok Battle.
No comments:
Post a Comment