Developing an art style for BAMF! – Part 4

Hey everybody! This will be my last blog post about developing BAMF!’s art style, and it will be focused on the background art development.

BAMF!’s background art was spearheaded by our artist Chloe Chan who comes from an illustration background. As such, she has great painting skills which were perfect for our environmental design needs. Because our game’s characters are flat-coloured with thick black outlines, we made the backgrounds textured and painterly without outlines. This allowed the characters to really stand out so the player can easily follow the action. The idea came from animated films, which have used the same method for decades.

Environment concept art.

Since Double Stallion is based in Montreal, many of our urban design cues came from our beloved city. In the Red Light-themed stages especially, we included many buildings resembling famous seedy landmarks of Montreal. Brawlers typically have isometric backgrounds anywhere between 20 to 45 degree angles. We followed suit with this trend however we realized early on that it made the backgrounds feel very rigid and boring. To combat this, we decided to break the perspective rules a little, and gave the backgrounds a lot of wonky angles. The result was more dynamic and zany.

Megatropolis’ many nightclubs.

Since we needed to have many short stages, it would’ve been impossible within our budget/time constraints to produce custom background art for each stage. Instead, we opted for producing three stage themes, each with their own colour palette, mood and music. Assets for each theme were produced in a way where they could be combined and shuffled in order to reduce the appearance of re-uses. For example, buildings signs, doors, walls and windows were all created independently and could be mixed up with the assets of other buildings in order to produce new buildings. Furthermore, each theme tended to have a certain progression/evolution. For example, the Underground theme went from a subway station to caves.

Subway tracks eventually lead to an underground cave system.

Although we originally set out to produce only three different environment themes, we did have a fourth underway. Despite never having been completed, we still have some assets to show for it. Behold, for the very first time, BAMF!’s “Asiatown” stage theme:

The unreleased “Asiatown” stage theme.

As I mentioned at the end of Part 3, many features and artwork never make it into the final product. Sometimes because of time constraints, other times because of performance issues. This is a common occurrence in game productions, big and small. It’s important not to take these cuts personally and rather focus on making the best with the art that you keep. Art Directing on BAMF! was a long and sometimes arduous process with lots of cuts and re-do’s, but it was an amazing experience and I’m proud of the results.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this 4 part retrospective of mine. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Cheers!