Feb 2020: Breakdown of an Art Revision

As our game matured, and we started digging deeper for feedback, and as we learned what to observe and listen to from players at conventions, we noticed two things.

First, people like the overall aesthetics of the art style.

In a genre dominated by pixel art or the occasional shiny 3D model, we aspired from day one to come up with a unique style, one inspired by comics, cartoons, pulp sci-fi novel covers and B movie posters.  It resonated with people!

But… second — and this point stayed hidden beneath the first for a good long while — people were also struggling with the functionality of the art.

In a fast-paced game that has a lot going on at all times, some of our design choices were leaving the playing field a bit muddled.  Players had a hard time tracking individual ships as they would overlap and blend with each other, and in some cases, with the background as well.

On top of this, at high speeds some of the ship forms weren’t being communicated well.  This ship, in particular, was the subject of many misinterpretations, some misreading the cannons as flippers and thinking they were tiny dolphins, others still saw shrimp-like shapes in here.  Understandable when they’re flying at you at 30 meters a second and you’re just learning how to fly a spaceship, but not what we were trying to convey.

The challenge before us: make the art clearer without betraying the stylistic choices that we loved and that fans were responding positively to.

Prompted by a positive response to some promotional artwork, we put together a small test case where we went all-in on the comic styling and added some inking inspired by our favorite comic books:

The outline served a few purposes above and beyond style, helping delineate ships from each other and making them pop off of the background.

Sharing our first tests with folks inside the team (and a select handful of folks outside) we knew we were onto something.  One change and it was as if I could feel my brain working less to process what it was looking at, leaving it more time and energy to devote to strategy.

Our big test of the new-style artwork came at PAX South 2020, and it wasn’t so much what fans were saying about it but what they weren’t saying that told us we had made the right choices.

The action was no less frenetic, and while the challenge overcame many players, we weren’t hearing the players who said that they didn’t even see what had killed them.  They seemed more engaged, overall, more likely to stick around and try multiple runs. We had plenty of returning fans who offered no protest at the change in style, which let us know we had done right by the original aesthetics with the change.  And yes, there were no longer fans asking if they were supposed to shoot the dolphins.

(If you’d like to read about some of the tips and tricks we used to make a bunch of new art in a new style in a fraction of the time it took to create the original art, check out January’s blog post!)