In many games, characters are the first thing to be defined, since they drive so much of the game’s mechanics and storytelling.

In the style exploration step, the team begins to solidify the art direction of their project. This involves exploration of multiple different art styles and how they would be visually represented in a game.

Character, object, and environments will start to be explored to figure out the overall aesthetic mood of a game. Even user interface (UI) elements will also have to be explored so that the mood of the game is communicated well to the player through elements they interact with.

In the case of our dragon game, artists would need to start creating style guides for characters. These would each be done individually, one at a time. When exploring styles, concept artists would have to work quickly to create something that has strong enough fidelity to be evaluated, but still be able to be done in a time-efficient manner.

For example, let’s say we’re trying to define how a dragon character would look in our game. We’d first do a bunch of different exploration sketches. For an average artist, each of these sketches might take 5-10 minutes. They’re meant to be low fidelity since investing a ton of time into each would not be efficient.

Our art director, designers, and maybe even marketing would then go through the sketches and see which ones most align with the game’s audience and overall feel. Once we’ve selected a few to refine, we begin to render out the concept artwork. For our little dragon here, we’ll draw out the rest of the body according to the cute style that we decided on.

Afterwards, we’ll probably need to spend a few hours rendering out the dragon to something that feels like a vertical slice of our art style.

We’ll need to do this with multiple characters, objects, environments, and more to create a cohesive style guide that represents our game.

How Layer AI can help

Layer is ideal at exploring how a similar character looks in different art styles. With tons of pre-loaded styles to choose from, artists can greatly accelerate the envisioning process.

Instead of having to sketch and take those sketches to full renders for concept artwork, developers can quickly explore what something looks like without having to commit significant time. Simple prompts mixed with different art styles can produce a lot of high-fidelity results. Let’s see what kind of blue dragons we can make with Layer:

You can see that it’s really easy to generate high-fidelity concept artwork with Layer. This allows much more rapid style exploration which ultimately gets your game team to production faster.

We could even take one of our earlier sketches and use it as a reference material. This gives us greater control over the output.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with styles on Layer. We know that supporting artists requires a broad range of aesthetics that match different types of concept art brought into the platform.

As you can see below, the possibilities are almost endless with built-in styles ranging from digital painting and steampunk to cartoon manga.

Time savings

Layer can help game art teams save a massive amount of time at the style exploration step. For example, to create a single piece of concept art, an artist might have to do the following:

• 6 - 10 sketches at 5 to 10 minutes each (100 minutes total)
• 4 - 8 hours for a full render from a final selected sketch

They would then have to repeat this process for every piece of concept art. It’s easy to see how creating a style guide could take an art team weeks to do. Layer allows artists to maintain control with their sketches, but can save that 4 - 8 hours per final illustration.

Additionally, game teams can even skip the sketching stage and just generate concepts purely from text prompts. This saves time in the sketching process and allows a wider range of freedom when it comes to exploration.

The power of AI tools allows game developers to work both quickly and at high quality. For example, this is a new workflow for character style exploration:

1. Use Layer’s Forge tool and write prompts for various art styles for “a blue dragon on a white background”
2. Select the outputs that the teams like the best and use them as reference images to create sketches from (5-10 minutes per sketch)
3. Use Layer’s BW Sketch reference option to fully render out sketches in 30 seconds each.

Takeaways

It’s easy to see how Layer can accelerate a game’s pre-production process. An artist could go from spending hours per final concept or art style exploration to mere minutes. This allows bolder, more varied exploration within the same amount of pre-production time, ultimately helping solidify a game’s art style more quickly and decisively. 

In our next blog, we’ll continue showing how Layer can speed up the style exploration process. We just covered how Layer impacts the ideation and character style exploration steps, so next we’ll cover the next three parts of style exploration: objects, environments, and user interface.