Patryk's Log

I was in charge of the art in this game. I used a bunch of tutorials to try many different shaders, to come up with a sort of cartoonish looking style, like a noir comic book. In the end none of them really achieved what I wanted, and I ended up using the one that I think worked the best. I also tried a few outline options, and one worked decently well for this use case. I also used a tutorial to make the camera pixelated, to make it more stylized. This art style was meant to be easy to look at, unique and to reinforce the theme of the game. In the game, while you play as the “Kidnapped” every colour becomes desaturated, making the whole game black and white. However, while you play as the “Detective” every colour is visible to you again, this adds a unique way to make and solve puzzles, using not only the objects around the level but also the colours. The desaturation allows the player to distinguish between the two views and further expanding on the theme of the game. Media often portrays flash backs or things that happened in the past in a black and white filter, this desaturation adds that effect to our game while you play as the “Kidnapped”, as this happens in the past.  

   Shown above is an example of the shader and outline used,  a lot of contrast and shading is very minimal. 

Shown above is the pixelated version.  It makes everything look like pixel art which I think is a nice stylistic choice and brings the simple charm of the game out. It also makes the game possibly look older, retro like, further enforcing that noir, comic book theme we we’re going for. I also modelled a few objects for the game, like the door shown above, a bottle, and a key. 

I’ve never worked with shaders or modelled. It is important that this game has a clean and simple art style, to aid with easing the player into puzzles and not distract them from the main task, while also looking appealing to the eye and matching the theme we were going for. Asset packs have also been used throughout the game to further fill in the levels with detail. Usually if you think of a detective puzzle game you’d think of a hyper realistic game, we wanted to diverge that expectation and create something truly unique in its genre. Lighting is very minimal, once again to limit distraction and promote puzzle solving.