The art of Remembrance and the thoughts behind it

Today we will be talking about art! But before we start doing that I would just like to introduce myself and to let you know how I relate to the game Remembrance. I’m Gabriel Björk Stiernström and have been a part of Remembrance since the very beginning of this project, since a few game concepts were discussed between me and the talented Gustav Arneback (who now carries the title of being the projects Lead Musician)! We talked about the last time we felt truly amazed by what a game could accomplish and how immersed we would feel in the games that we played. In recent years of playing games I’ve myself felt that the lack of amazement and wonder have grown bigger, that most games feel the same and repetitive. Almost as if they are all following a certain formula that is to “promise” the success of the game. The thing is that I understand the mindset of If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and I know that (most) big companies are afraid to take risks with new innovative ideas. But as far as I see it this might just be the core of the problem, I’d rather see a failed attempt at something new than a successful tenth game in a franchise. And in comes the indie developers!

Instead of playing the big blockbuster games I began to understand that I was more drawn to indie-developed games. And as for many it all began with Minecraft, a game which many would say look looks downright awful, which I thought too at first, but once I got acquainted with the game I couldn’t stop playing it. I was hooked. After a while the graphics didn’t bug me anymore and along with the sound effects and music it instead made for a unique, charming and absolutely beautiful game in its own special way. Once the indie-market began showing itself I got around to playing games such as World of Goo, Braid, Limbo and Fez and amongst other games I enjoyed these thoroughly. They reminded me of what games can be and what games mustn't be, and all of them had their unique and charming style of graphics to them. Indie developers clearly has another mindset when it comes to the graphics and how it can not only help with the emotion and feeling, but how it can elevate the design and mechanics of the game.

Enter our game Remembrance! A game where the of use shapes, colours and composition will help to entrap the players in our world. When developing the graphics for the game we have been looking to a lot of places, at first I wanted to go with something similar to Monument Valley. A game using a lot of vibrant colours and gradients with very little geometry. Then I looked to Journey, another beautiful game where textures are for the most part very absent and where the atmosphere plays the biggest role. Though being afraid that people would associate our game to much with Journey we had to find another source of inspiration, and very conveniently the game Firewatch by Campo Santo was released. Once again the textures aren’t the important part here, as most objects only have a diffuse color. Campo Santo also have a fantastic dev blog and a great GDC Talk about their art which have been really helpful to us. We have actually read quite a few dev blogs from different studios to better understand what problems might occur and/or how to solve them or avoid them. The Witness has been another great source of inspiration and we are more along the lines of using their shape language on our meshes, meaning a lot of hard edges (where the light breaks) and distinct geometry on the actual models.

Since the world is so vast and yet empty it is important to make all of the things that’s in it feel alive. We will therefore have wind flowing through the grass and on the branches of trees, while leaves dance their way down to the ground. The rivers will be full of life with its swift motions and particles will traverse the grassy planes. It is a wish to add in some animals here and there (such as birds) to make the place feel even more inhabited. We were  initially planning on having NPC’s in the world, which would help with the storytelling and with the feeling, but because of the time constraint we have decided cut this part out for now. Instead focus have been on our main character which I will write another post about. For now I will leave you with an early in-game graphics test!

- Gabriel


Early in-game graphics test