Games with mixed art

Questions, skill improvement, and respectful critique involving art assets.
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Mysterious Friend
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Re: Games with mixed art

#16 Post by Mysterious Friend »

I'm really glad Katy133 linked to that article, it's a very interesting read!!! I think a mixed art style in one game could be good. I've always thought it might be interesting to have a game that was a sort of collaborative effort between artists (maybe each sprite is done by a different artist or a section of sprites is done by different artists, the CGs for one character done by a different artist, etc.) Or if there's a good story reason for it, it could work as well. I'll mirror what a lot of others have said before and say that consistent styles do look better together but I really do think i'd be interesting to have a project that makes good use of a varied art style.
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KarmaLarma
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Re: Games with mixed art

#17 Post by KarmaLarma »

I consider consistency to be pretty important, but I've found consistency can be a problem even in games with only one character artist. In a VN I played, each character seemed to have different proportions (and I don't mean in the way a tall person and short person might have different proportions). One had a very long neck and small head. One had a head almost twice as large as the main character's head but their bodies were the same. One had cat ears that looked like they had been taken off of an entirely different sprite and then pasted on to that one (which shouldn't have been the case because these were not stock assets) even though there were other cat eared characters in the game that didn't have this problem. So the style isn't quite as important as making sure the characters look good next to each other. Any one of these characters I've described might have looked passable on their own, but next to each other it made every oddity stand out greatly and made what was otherwise nice art very distracting.

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MoonByte
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Re: Games with mixed art

#18 Post by MoonByte »

It depends on how it is mixed and what is mixed, I'd say?
I mean, the movie "Le Tableau" does this on purpose as does "The Prophet", but both are cohersive in their own.
Whenever I work with others and there are multiple artists, we divide the work in a way that it isn't obvious that we have different styles (though the better you get at 3D/2D, the easier it is to copy a style).
So I might do the lineart, someone else the colouring, again someone else the UI, etc.
Or in the case of 3D, someone models, someone textures, someone riggs, etc.

It is much more obvious that you have different artists with different styles when you have them do the same thing.
One example (though I liked the game in general) would be "Coming Out On Top":
Most of the art was done by the main creator, but she comissioned an (one of my most favorite) artist for the CGs.
Which lead to not only two wildly different styles, but also to moments where it was very difficult to "recognize" the CG characters. You knew it was A and B, but they just looked so extremely different that they might has well have been someone entirely else.

Which is a pretty bad thing in my opinion unless there is a in-game justification (like dimension traveling, POV-switches or something).

It is semi-forgivable for me if the background and the figures have been made by different people. If the ability is too different, it can look really weird, but I can kinda accept it (I mean, Disney movie backgrounds were painted with shading and details while the characters were just flat).

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Re: Games with mixed art

#19 Post by Horma »

I think it can work well with some subject matters, such as mental illness, creativity and certain types of comedy. Also with switching POVs perhaps. I'd point out that in those cases, the art styles might have to be different enough. If there are only small differences, many people will intepret it as lack of polish.

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