Tiny Q&A: Lock’s Quest and producing artwork for DS, Part 2

Here’s the continuation of our interview with Jeff Luke, designer and art manager with 5th Cell. In this segment, Luke talks a bit about the art style used in their innovative DS strategy game Lock’s Quest.

Tiny Cartridge: Were there any art elements at all that were carried over from Drawn to Life? Do you have a library of grass, for example?

Jeff Luke: No actual pieces of art were carried over from Drawn To Life to Lock’s Quest, but we definitely borrowed from the style and color palette. As far as libraries of art goes, we really only have the assets from each game we’ve worked on. We try to make the most unique art we can for each title so that way there’s no real confusion.

What comes first, the character art or the sprite? Were any characters changed because their appearance in character portraits looked weird in sprite form?

Someone usually makes a sketch of a character at first and then samples are worked on in sprite form. With Lock’s Quest, we had concept art for each character that actually turned into the chatbox portrait, with some modifications. When changes were needed, it was easier to tweak the portrait then to request brand new sprites and animations for a character .

Is there an overall color theme for Lock’s Quest, and does it differ from Drawn to Life? I noticed that both games had a lot of similarities in the color scheme, but LQ had more brown and grey (for obvious reasons).

I’m really glad you picked up on the color scheme similarities of both titles! We definitely wanted to borrow that really charming feel of that Drawn to Life had. Bright and vibrant colors, giving it that almost dream like appearance. With Drawn to Life, we wanted over the top brightness and lots of contrast. Even in some situations we had conflicting colors just to make you notice certain things. It definitely had a more over the top cartoon feel to the color palette. We wanted to keep that same art standard and quality when creating the assets for Lock’s Quest, but we also wanted to make it feel more grounded to earth. We felt that these more natural tones would help bring out the important parts a bit more as well as giving it a bit more of a mature look.

Does the style of art used influence the game, or is it more the other way around? Are certain types of games better-suited to 2D?

I really think it just depends. With Drawn to Life, we had a specific art style in mind; something charming and fun and very friendly. This resulted in a game that was easy for a younger audience to pick up, yet still fun for an older audience as well. With Drawn to Life, it was a game about making art so we wanted the rest of the game to look as gorgeous and welcoming as the art you yourself created. I think that to an extent, art will always have a bit of an influence on what the game is exactly, but at the same time, when creating the game idea, it usually has some influence on the approach you end up taking with the art. It’s really a mixed bag. They both influence each other in the end, sometimes one side more than the other.

As far as certain types of games better-suited for 2D. Well, I’ll be honest, I’m a bit biased. I grew up playing Mega Man and Blaster Master, so to me, the platformer genre fits best on 2D. I feel like a limitation in graphics gives the player a bigger chance to use their imagination and fill in certain “gaps”. I think a lot of games are lacking in that nowadays because the graphics give you all of the information you would ever need. When games start to take that approach towards total realism, it just ends up becoming an interactive movie instead of a story that you get to be a part of. I remember being young and some of the sprites in older games were ambiguous so they really gave you a chance to just make your own interpretation on exactly what that enemy was. I feel like imagination is just as important in a game as gameplay. We get mail from kids who play Drawn to Life and they are just writing us stories about Baki’s or other random enemies and characters in the game. Seeing that makes me feel like we’ve made something that will stick with these kids like playing Super Mario Bros. 3 did for big kids in the 20’s to 30’s now. So, to reiterate, platformers should stick with 2D. There’s still a whole world that is waiting to be discovered.

Thank you for this opportunity and all the support!

Thanks to Jeff and to 5th Cell for the time and the consideration!

tags / drawn to life / 5th cell / interview / jc / lock's quest

Tiny Q&A: Lock’s Quest and producing artwork for DS

I love the distinctive 2D look shared by 5th Cell’s Drawn to Life and Lock’s Quest — two games for which art is an important aspect (especially Drawn to Life, which requires players to create some of the objects and sprites). There’s just something about the sprite work and the color palettes that make their DS games look better than just about anything else on the system. Scribblenauts looks to carry on the signature 5th Cell look.

Jeff Luke, who does game design and art management for the company, kindly answered some questions about the process of creating art for a 2D DS game. This first portion deals with some of the technical details of art production and conversion. Check back tomorrow for the second part of the interview, which is more stylistic in focus.

Tiny Cartridge: Is the character art drawn on paper and scanned or drawn on the computer? How is it colored?

Jeff Luke: Well, it all starts out as an idea on paper, which we then send to our partner studio in Malaysia, Sherman3D. We give them a description for how we want the art to be along with some examples and the original art which we scanned in.

After they are finished, they usually send us a few different examples. We give them some feedback on what we like and don’t like and then they make the necessary changes. After a few rounds of that, we settle on a design and move forward with it.

This process actually sets the basis for the rest of the game as well. Once we have a few main pieces of art, we have a standard that has to be followed for every piece of art we make.

When it comes to color, our Art Director Edison Yan, will color the original concepts and sends those to Malaysia. This gives them a color palette to work off of. Malaysia replicates those colors and creates a 16 color sprite, which is converted, optimized and put into the game .

What kinds of programs are used to create the in-game sprites and environments?

We actually use a few different programs. We use Pro Motion by Cosmigo, Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Certain programs we use for different reasons. Backgrounds and detailed environments are usually done in Photoshop by our Art Director, but we also do some sprite work in Photoshop as well. More recently, we’ve been doing animations and tile sets in Pro Motion, simply because the program is designed for that purpose in mind. Paint Shop Pro is used mostly for the conversion process which I will get into later.

Does any software for art production come from Nintendo? Do they provide any tools for DS art production?

Nintendo actually does provide their toolset for art conversion, where we take the raw art and convert it for use in the actual game. Their toolset could also be used for doing sprite work, animations and palette work. Basically, the tool is made for converting the raw art into a file that can be read by the Nintendo libraries for DS development.

Other than the resolution, what else do you have to keep in mind when working for the DS screen?

Well, one of the biggest things to keep in mind is the different brightness settings. You need to make sure your game looks good on all brightness levels which can sometimes be quite a hassle, but in the end, it’s the attention to detail that can make or break the experience for gamers. In conjunction with the resolution, screen real estate is a really big issue. You need to always be aware of exactly how much space you have on that screen at all times. Make a GUI sprite too big and you just end up having to redo it. As an example, in Drawn to Life our character was a bit larger than the average platformer character so we had to be aware of his size at all times when creating levels and enemy placement. One last thing would be layer blending. Blending between 2D and 3D layers can sometimes be a bit tricky.

Approximately how many frames of animation are created for each character?

We try to limit each animation to 6 frames or less. This provides us with additional memory to work with, and challenges us to create animations that still manage to look smooth with as little frames as possible. 6 frames doesn’t sound like much, but when you think about all the different animations a character might have, it adds up quickly. The average character in one of our games has anywhere between 6-10 unique animations. So, we’re looking at anywhere between 36-60 actual frames of animation per character, which takes up a lot of space when you have a lot of unique characters. So, ways around that are using palette swaps on generic characters (swapping the colors) so we don’t need to keep making unique animations for each one.

Do you have machinery in place to convert to other sizes/resolutions for other hardware formats— just in case?

Our machinery is called Adobe Photoshop. Haha! But seriously, we really don’t ever have to worry about size conversion too much. Anything that could ever need to be higher resolution, we just make sure we create the original assets in high res and then scale down from there for in game art if needed. All of the portraits in Lock’s Quest started out as massive, multi-thousand pixel, full-body images of the characters that we then scaled down and took just the upper body portion of for the portraits. Perhaps one day, if we move to consoles, we will need to initiate a process for scaling art to different resolutions more efficiently, but for now, working on one system, we’ve got a process that works perfectly for it.

See also: Custom Lock’s Quest DS Lite, Lock’s Quest IGN advertising

tags / 5th cell / drawn to life / lock's quest / art / interview