Making the Project PULSE Style Guide

Especially when working with several artists, it’s very important for a team to establish a common, cohesive style and workflow; we did that through use of a style guide.

Once we decided upon the overall theme and design of this game, those in and out of the art team took a day to gather up images and create moodboards for how they envisioned it to look. We then discussed each of these images as a team and how they might fit within our world, looking for common themes of color, shape, and overall vibe, until we picked out a few key images to analyze further.

We definitely threw around some words like “chunkifying” and “wonkifying” to exaggerate and skew certain features of objects, establishing that it would be very rare to see 90 degree angles in this environment. Of course, this comes with its own challenges while working procedurally, and we knew we had to keep it and our camera angle in mind when thinking about these assets.

Our lovely art director Naomi made a couple example assets to bounce off and refine the look, establishing standards and practices for modeling, texturing, and exporting. With this, we had something every team member can reference, and ultimately the first visual representatives of our city: a dumpster and a fire hydrant.

Certainly this has helped us streamline our workflow for creating these, and is an essential part of any game art production process regardless of what style you want.

- Zewei