Pixel Ark: The Look of the Animals In Tooth and Tail

8 years ago

Art director Adam deGrandis here. Get ready for another exciting installment of Art Post Where I Talk About the Visual Design of Tooth and Tail.

You might not realize it, but designing the look of the units in an RTS game is a pretty complex, challenging task. One one hand, you want to create units that have a soul. They need to be fun to look at and full of character. On the other hand, you need each one to be simple/unique enough to be able to clearly see them when they’re all stacked up on top of one another in a mob. What’s more, in a game with an unconventional roster like Tooth and Tail, you should be able to guess what each unit does based on 1-5 seconds of seeing it for the first time. It’s a lot to balance, but a combination of art fundamentals and high-level rules of the game’s setting help us meet the challenge.

Let’s start with the high-level art fundamentals, and since this is an art post, let’s explain this stuff with pictures. Here’s some of the things we’re consider when we’re trying to craft a unit that balances visibility, character, and all that other critical stuff we want from the final asset.

We try to have simple, clean, identifiable silhouettes, so they stand out from crowds. This is a common thing that character designers in all mediums have to wrestle with. Case in point, have you ever noticed that no other characters in The Simpsons have pointy hair like Bart or Lisa? That’s no accident. It ensures their outline is always unique in a crowd. In Tooth and Tail, no two units of the same size hold a gun the same way or have the same posture.

Silhouettes

Another thing we consider are the values, hues, and saturation of the unit. Value is overall lightness or darkness of a color, hue is what we traditionally think when someone says color (is it green, or yellow, or blue, etc) and saturation is the overall intensity of the color. For the environment artwork in Tooth and Tail, we limit the value changes, number of hues, and overall the saturation. Conversely, the units have much wider value changes (more bright brights and dark darks), utilize more/different hues, and are much more saturated. This ensures they pop off the environment. We also make the configurations of all of these elements different from unit to unit within a given tier to help them stand apart from themselves.

Darkness

Next, we have the faction color placement. The faction colors are the most saturated in the game, and just like everything else, placement varies from unit to unit to help with unit identification. Think of how ineffective faction color would be as a unit identifier if everyone wore the same style red uniform.

Faction Color

Finally, we have animation. We use the animation to make the units feel fun and active. The frog’s hop is exaggerated and squishy. The wolf’s yelling (which at the time I’m writing this, hasn’t been released yet) looks loud. The animation is used to make these little groups of pixels feel like living things that you want to play with. Here’s the sketchy version of another unit who’s still in the pipe; the Badger

Outline

It’s interesting, because while “animation should make the units look fun” was always a goal, we actually wanted to approach the animation in different way. Originally, we wanted to have the units move as similarly to the real-life animals as possible. The animals of Tooth and Tail might walk on two legs but would run on all fours; basically, the more they exerted themselves, the more animal they became. This proved challenging because of two main reasons.

First, as I said earlier, we worked really hard to develop the silhouette and tone/color composition of each unit. But the difference between the silhouette and composition of an animal standing in their idle/attack pose is thoroughly different than the silhouette and composition of an animal running on all fours. I felt it was important for readability of big battles that their silhouette stay as consistent as possible between their moving and their idle/attack.

Second, with the exception of the snake and the birds, all units hold a weapon in their hands. This means that when moving, they’d need hold their weapon with one hand and run on three. That approach works fine for weapons that can be naturally held with one hand, such as the squirrel’s pistol or the lizard’s spear, but some weapons look weird to hold with one hand. The boar’s flamethrower. The skunk’s grenade launcher. Those look like things meant to be held by two hands. We could have designed new versions of those weapons that didn’t need to be held with two hands, but then we’d start to move out of the game’s intended era; A flamethrower you wear on your arms would probably look more like sci-fi and less WWI/dawn of industrial warfare.

I mention this because it’s an important truth of game development that’s useful to keep in mind as a player. We’ve all seen previews of games that talk about Really Cool Feature X, but said feature is absent when the game ships. It’s probably that while it sounded Really Cool on paper, in reality it Didn’t Work and was maybe even Extra Shitty.

So those are a few of the art fundamentals we’re utilizing to get the job done, but as I said before, we also have a series of high-level guidelines based on the setting to help us along.

First, “Form follows function”. Players should have a rough idea of what a unit does five seconds after seeing it for the first time. Think of how obvious most the weapons are in Tooth and Tail or how much smaller the Tier 1 units are compared to the Tier 3. The obviousness of the weaponry, the scale of the units, and even their physique give the player important cues to how they can and should be used in a fight.

Weaponry

Second, “Reptiles are primitive, Mammals use complex tools”. We break this in a few spots, but generally, reptiles wear less clothing and have melee attacks while mammals are more thoroughly covered and use firearms. We started doing this after I joined the team. People who’ve been in the community for some time might remember when the roster was a lot different. There were Cats and Possums and a bunch of other animals that aren’t in the game anymore. They weren’t entirely cut, though; they just turned into different animals. For example, the Possum used to be the fast melee unit, but it was replaced with the Lizard. The function in game was preserved. It was only the presentation that changed.

Here’s a crop from one of the original pages of sketches where I was reordering the roster, and suggesting new animals. Funny enough, these are from before “reptiles wear less clothing” was added to the rule. Those of you in the alpha may also notice that these guys aren’t currently in the game. They, like many other animals, were cut along the way.

Sketches

It’s worth noting that even with these older drawings, we were considering silhouette and faction color placement.

Third, “Units should be modeled on real world WW1 combat roles”. Again, we break this rule - or at least stretch it - in places, but the idea is that if we have a unit in the game, it should be based in a real world role from WW1 (or slightly earlier). Andy S, who created this rule, came up with a spreadsheet that detailed a role from that era, it’s function on the battlefield, and the Tooth and Tail equivalent. Following this rule ensured that our units felt logical, and when a player first saw a unit, there’d be a better chance they’d innately understand what that unit’s role was, especially when compared to other units.

Here’s where I’d post a picture of Andy’s spreadsheet, but since that’s a dumb idea, I’ll just keep writing.

These are the big three rule we follow more or less consistently, but there were a handful of others that got left by the wayside because it turned out they weren’t that useful. I had developed an extensive visual dictionary of sorts; a list of clothing, physiotypes, etc that would help inform players about the capabilities and usage of a unit. An example is that all stealth units should be wearing cloaks or hooded attire, and conversely, no other unit should be wearing that kind of outfit. Our single stealth unit, the Chameleon, certainly does wear a cloak, but so does the Fox, who used to be stealth but isn’t anymore. We never bothered to change the Fox’s outfit, though, because it does a good job of saying “Sniper”. And so, that rule fell by the wayside.

Sniper Fox

As it happens, “reptiles are primitive, mammals use tools” was also from that original visual dictionary, but it proved much more useful a phrase than “hoods are for stealth”. If our roster was bigger - which was the case when the dictionary was developed - some of the rules we dropped might have stuck around. We ended up with 15 units that can run around the field, though, and a number that small doesn’t need page after page of rules to ensure they look fun, stylish, and readable.

So there you have it. We’re currently in the final stretch of art production for these little guys as I write this, and it feels good to reflect on the process of making them. What started as an unstable collection of animals that were being changed in sometimes dramatic ways on a weekly basis has been worked down to a roster of 20 tightly designed units. And just like Andy and Andy approached the mechanics and gameplay in a methodical way, Jerome and I did the same for the visuals. I’ve said it before; art is often thought of as a subjective thing, but that’s a mistake. If you want to make things that look good to the widest number of people possible, pepper your work with at least a little bit of order, logic, and reason.

Coincidently, that’s the same approach I used when I was trying to eek out a C- on my final chemistry paper in 10th grade. Here’s a really old sketch of the boar to go out on. Thanks for reading, goofballs.

-Adam

Old Sketches

Do you twitter or tumblr? Adam twitters and tumblrs all the time. Follow him! @adamdegrandis and adamdegrandis.tumblr.com.

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