Video games can use many different styles to create a unique look. For Clash: Artifacts of Chaoswe knew from the start that we wanted to use a very colorful and unrealistic one for many reasons: to differentiate it from other games of the genre, to allow us to stylize and exaggerate the animation and color palette, and to approximate the illustrations and the punk fantasy art that inspired the creation of the world in the first place.
Stylized rendering is a powerful tool that emphasizes this “What should I draw?” And “How do you draw it?” are two different questions. This is the third time we’ve visited the surreal world of the Zenozoic and its primitive humanoid animal inhabitants, but it’s the first time we’ve approached “How to Draw It” with a truly different technique!
There are many ways we could have gone and we tested different styles before landing on the one we used. By choosing what to simplify and what to exaggerate, you can achieve very different effects. One of the more interesting styles we tested was a painterly look with thick brush strokes (above). It allowed for very expressive forms, a chaotic, almost impressionistic look and was certainly very different.
We ultimately decided against this style because of the oversimplification: our artists always wanted to include more and more small details in characters and environments, details that wouldn’t really shine in this Impressionist style.
The rendering style we ended up going for is called hatching or cross hatching. It is a drawing style that creates shading and conveys light by drawing closely spaced lines. The closer the lines are to each other, the darker the area appears. Commonly used in traditional drawings, illustrations, and comics, this style gives the artwork a hand-drawn look. This technique allowed us to achieve an illustrated style while preserving detail.
By separating the lighting information and conveying light intensity and detail primarily with the linework of the ink pen, we can treat color as a separate layer. This allows us to use more artificial color schemes that would look odd in a realistic rendering style, but feel consistent with how an illustration looks. Purple and orange skies, characters with blue or yellow skin, orange dirt, cyan and green mineral deposits in the mountain walls… we intentionally use saturated colors or color combinations that are hard to find in nature to convey that this is another world .
One of the biggest challenges in implementing the hatch style was making sure it would work at different distances and different levels of detail. It’s not just about drawing lines on the surfaces, because what works for small details up close might not work for a mountain from afar. In addition, some features need to be preserved more carefully, such as B. Character eyes, which are a focal point and must always remain well defined and sharp. The linework needs to be consistent so it looks like everything was created with the same tool.
Although we designed a very specific look for the game, we finally decided to enable player configuration options to personalize the look. Players can choose a cleaner look or add and remove effects. We’ve even kept a comic-inspired black and white mode, which isn’t ideal for readability, but is still very cool to play with!
Clash: Artifacts of Chaos will be released on March 9th and is available for pre-order now on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. If you’re interested in keeping an eye on all future news, developer blogs and trailers, don’t hesitate to follow us on Twitter or join our official Discord server.