Adventures in AR: Iconoclass

These past few days, I've been thinking a lot about the combat system of ARventure. We'll talk about my plans for it in another post, but it drove me to work on some art assets and I wanted to show them off:

All in a day's work

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. It's a pretty good selection of weapons for the game. Obviously these will not be the only weapons in the final game, but for the time being I tried to create one weapon for each of the character archetypes I have planned. Most are fairly straight forward: Sword and shield for the warrior, dagger for the rogue, bow and arrow for the ranger. The book is a magic tome for spell users (I've been playing a lot of Fire Emblem Heroes this past month or so). The staves are for the cleric and witch characters, who will deal with buffs/healing and debuffs/draining heath respectively. And then of course there's a potion, because why wouldn't there be? We'll talk more about the archetypes and their roles when we discuss the combat system.

Unfortunately, after patting myself on the back for this work, I realized the style of these items doesn't really match the existing art I've created for the NPC's like Sir Victory and the Explorer. It was probably bound to happen, considering I free handed these items aiming for a cartoony look, while I literally traced real people's faces for the characters. I'm not sure if this will be an issue, since these items are intended for the inventory, combat, and other icons, while NPC's will appear on the map and in quest UI's. It's something I will need to look out for, especially as I move forward with other assets.

However, working on these items made me realize a slightly more concerning issue. I made these items in the same SVG file, and they were created to scale of each other. The NPC's, on the other hand, were all created in separate files, so their scale is different. I wasn't worried about this initially, because it's vector art and scales fine, but the inconsistent starting scale will affect the line art. Since the scales are different, when exported to bitmaps, the stroke of the outlines will be an inconsistent width. Oh no! And worse yet, if assets are scaled in-game for any reason, that will make it even more difficult to maintain a style for the line art. Again, I'm not sure if this will be a huge issue, or even noticeable, but the thought of it gives me fake-OCD anxiety.

With all that said, I like this style. It's easy to create and looks pretty good, both at a large and small scale. I even like the colors I chose, which is something that doesn't usually happen with my work. I'm definitely going to channel this look moving forward. I'll have to make a decision as to whether or not the style should be uniform through out the entire game or if the map and inventory/combat can have distinct looks. Fire Emblem Heroes looks fine with a very detailed style for in menus and a chibi style for combat, so we'll have to see. If nothing else, I can take a stab at making the NPC's match this new style better. More vibrant colors and matching scale may be all it takes.

That's all for now. Got a lot of exciting stuff to talk about now that I'm getting back into the ARventure swing. Stay tuned.