Stylized Ice Environment

Lead artist intern at Fabula Studios

Ice, ice, baby

One of my assignments during my internship was to create the a new art style for the game the Tipping Point. Recently they had to go back from scratch and needed a fresh head for this. My role here also diverted into environment and prop designer as well as animator.

The guide rules for the style was low poly, light use of textures, 3D, hyper realistic lightning and bright colors.

Check it out on Steam!

Exploration

The first part for me was to identify how they wanted the style to be, while they did list a couple of priorities, I needed to know what specifically they wanted. Therefore I began to conceptualize different ice environments. The first two environments was too "rendered" and they needed to become more simple. I then drew this snow pile with rock, in order to have some comparables. The middle point between realism and cartoony was a blocky effect, which was this low-polyness they saught after.

Next I needed to do some research so I could probably identify the different ice environments in the Artic zone. Here I looked into daylights and weather, and how shape language worked in snow and ice. This research was important to know, since some of the inaccessible areas in the game needed to be clearly visible. In other words, which surfaces are climable and which are not.

The first iterations

The final surfaces

How did the style look in game?

Here are the a couple of screenshots of the art style being implemented.

Level Design

After figuring out the art style, I had to visualize the prototype level, so the developers know how to style it. Here is the first level, visualized in 2D.

We are viewing this from a two point perspective, since the game is a 3D sidescroller platformer.

Weather Concepts

I had to create different weather scenarios in the Artic, such as snowstorms, northern lights and etc. Otherwise I had to illustrate the day cycle as well.

Props and Environments

Next up was the details and minor environments, such as the artic scientific equipment and tents.

Props

Artic Huts

Logo Animation

At the end of my internship I had to create a logo mock-up animation for when you open the game. This was together with the other intern, who did the audio design. The long animation is from the first pitch, after the feedback session we went with the ice cracking lake animation, but they didn't want the lake, instead the ice should fall down into a pitch down black hole.

Christian Emil Nielsen, Audio Design

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