Life As A Denki Artist
Stewart Graham is a visual guru and one of the founders of Denki. He ensures everything Denki does looks awesome and sets the standards for the other Denki artists.
The graphical side of videogaming is a very serious subject. Graphics cards were more or less created to allow games to look lovelier. Many of the leading dedicated games magazines can't bring themselves to look approvingly upon a game which is not pushing the cutting edge of the outer limit of graphical capabilities - and the hardcore audience always want 'bigger', 'better', 'faster' and, more often than not, 'more'.
The word 'fun' is not one which appears in that list very often; which is odd when you consider the whole point of games is supposed to be entertainment.
Denki's approach to visuals - both in-game and in general - follows quite a different pattern. Everything the company does - including visuals - is measured against the 'Denki Difference'. This is a set of guiding principles, as well as an outlook, allowing us to measure everything we do and decide whether it's 'Denki' or not. It's how we judge the critical aspects of everything we produce.
Denki also has a unique way of actually creating artwork, which means that a visual specialist (ok, artist) within Denki will constantly be pushed to extend themselves and move out of their particular comfort zone to create something new and different. Easy to say, perhaps, but far harder to justify.
So here's a breakdown of the major differences in the way Denki approaches graphics, art and visuals.
Unlike the majority of games studios, at Denki the split between preproduction (preparing to make the game), production (making the game) and post-production (polishing the game to make it lovely) is skewed towards the preproduction and postproduction sections.
Games being created by Denki have around 40% of the overall development cycle spent on preproduction. Contrast this with many studios that jump straight into developing the game as soon as they have a finalised concept document (or sometimes even before that).
Preproduction
Preproduction is where we figure out requirements, explore possibilities, create repertoire, define standards and visualise what the end product will look like to give us clear targets to aim for. This all involves a great deal of iteration. You have to leave your comfort zone entirely and explore as many new directions and possibilities as possible.
Regarding the visual style of the product, we're not interested in the normal 'happy place' where the game looks OK and everyone agrees that 'it'll do'. We want to define the extremes of the visual style as early as possible. Once you know what absolutely will NOT work for the game, then you can begin to refine the remaining styles and narrow down the possibilities.
And when we say extremes, we mean extremes: Two dimensional versus three dimensional, monochrome versus colour versus hyper-saturated colour, realistic versus cartoon-like (but which cartoons? Hanna-Barbera, Looney Tunes, Disney, Anime, Pixar, …). The list goes on and on.
This puts great demands on you, but it ensures that every Denki game will have its own unique visual style - whilst still retaining a certain Denkiness. It also demands that you are not 'precious' about their work. Once something has been dropped, it's dropped. There's no room for petulant prima donnas, demanding their work be appreciated. The team leader is responsible for all aspects of the game. He or she will take everyone's ideas, thoughts and opinions on-board, but the final decision lies with the lead. It's survival of the fittest for art.
This approach, when combined with Denki's daily briefings and weekly team reviews, means that the visual styles which do and do not work, can be narrowed down very quickly. Each team member - visual specialists, coders, and designers - must demonstrate what they've been doing to the rest of the team, on a weekly basis. There's also a faster, more informal briefing and update every morning. This provides the artists with immediate feedback from the rest of the team. This ensures you never spend weeks working on a style or direction which will not ultimately be used.
Once a specific style has been identified, then you can spend time refining and polishing that style, taking feedback on-board and then polishing some more.
Another major difference with Denki projects is the fact that only the simplest possible placeholders are used within the game during preproduction. Wherever possible, the coders use placeholder graphics and existing resources to get the game up-and-running quickly. This frees the visual specialists from having to create and edit game components for the coders to test. This allows both sides of the team to move forward far more rapidly and efficiently.
Production
Strange as it may sound, the production phase is actually the shortest aspect of the whole cycle. This is a high-pressure time to create and integrate a first pass of everything using the repertoire built up during preproduction. By this stage, the graphics, characters, environment, game logo and so on will all have been approved in principle, and the game will be beginning to take on the look of the end-product. The visual specialist's job doesn't end quite yet, however…
Postproduction
Polish, polish, polish. We spend around 40% of the project's schedule on iterating everything, making sure every character, every environment, every menu, every word and every pixel is lovely enough to make people smile. The visual specialist should by now know every aspect of the game backwards and have a list of tweaks and updates that they've noticed during production, that they know will make the difference between a game which looks good and a game which looks Totally Denki! Now's the time to show what you're made of and pull out every stop to make it better looking than every other game out there. Promotional materials are also prepared at this stage, as everyone gears up for completing the project.
Done!
Denki's Difference
There's no defined 'house style' at Denki. We like graphics that are bold, bright and accessible. Outside that, it's up to each artist to explore and discover new styles they can bring to their games. OK, if you were to push us, we'd probably say less emphasis on the greys, browns and gritty, post-apocalyptic wildernesses. Even if your game is set in a gritty, post-apocalyptic wilderness (and we won't say it'll never happen), you should still explore the rest of the palette. Yes, it's an infernal wasteland of misery and desperate survivors, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun!
