Key art has got to be one of the hardest things for me when it comes to game design/marketing. It’s something I have really limited experience in and it’s so different from other sorts of art.You have to think about things like margins and dimensions, leaving space for titles, and it has it’s own odd sort of unspoken style rules.
When you see great key art you know it. It’s dynamic and easily recognizable. It has a strong visual punch to it that is hard to describe. You tend to think of it as movie posters or billboards. Every single video game that is being marketed needs some sort of key art though as store art at the very minimum if not for press releases.
So how did I approach it for Dustwalker? Well let me start by showing you the images I started with and telling you how I got them.
A big part of it was finding a background. For me I thought about all those classic graduation/modeling pics(Sorry anyone who is graduating this year.) one of the things they have in common is great backgrounds. Yes I could have photo shopped in a background like I tried with some promo images for Frost Bite but honestly my photo shop skills are terrible.
I assembled a scene much like you would have done in the old days of photography with a camera, lights, and angles. Lighting is my bain right now in Unity but I managed something half way decent with multiple light sources. See that’s something I’ve been learning is that if you only use a single light source you just get silhouettes and shadows.
Each one of the lamps contains a tinted point light and there is also two directional lights lighting the scene. This creates some interesting shadows which is what I was going for.
For this one I looked at the popular games on itch.io and tried to frame the shot to really focus on the character. I also added a bit of forced perspective with the sword positioning.
Out of five shots two got used. That’s actually really good. I only took what I needed. The two below are what I ended up with after a little editing. They didn’t need much only a little sharpening and adjusting the contrast. I did very lightly use a poster filter on them then I added the text overlay. I used Krita for the editing. It is my go to free art software.
I’m quite happy with how these turned out. It was kinda fun setting up a little virtual photo shoot in the game. Let me know in the comments what you think and if there is anything you think I could do to improve them.
You can find Dustwalker at https://gildedoctopusstudios.itch.io/dustwalker-episode-1 I’d love to hear what you think of the beta version. The full version should be launching in the next couple weeks.
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