RE: Countdown to Untamed - Part 2
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Will there be a second skin pack??... or will that take some time or are you giving up on Skins?
Some of the art is awesome in the new batch and others the style just hasn't grown on me I guess or maybe we were just spoiled by a better artist for the first set. Maybe better artist isn't the correct term just that beta and alpha had a STYLE that really worked for cards. And some of the decisions of the art seemed so much more deliberate.
BETA vs UNTAMED ART REVIEW
Beta/Alpha were more vibrant with crisp lines and just popped out a bit better. They were perhaps more cartoony but they really stood out. It takes so long to really take in these new cards and they mesh with their backgrounds too much so they have trouble standing out because of that. Maybe because it seems like Every background is a dark background and most characters all have a dark contrast to them.
Even the white splinter seems to avoid typical white colors and go from muddy or grays immediately into a blown out highlight sort of white. Where as the original beta/alpha had a very consistent branded sort of white on the characters that gave them a distinctive look... you could tell it was a white splinter card.
Beta and alpha cards may have appeared more simplistic in design but they did much better at branding their splinters and being easier for the eyes to easily consume and the card standing out against their backgrounds.
But you know what's awesome about cards on blockchain... you can do skins!
It's definitely a process.
I suspect that by the time we release the next set, we'll end up somewhere in the middle between Beta and Untamed in terms of style.
The intention is to elevate the overall maturity and depth of the game with a style that can compete at a mainstream level. Not to say that "cartoony" can't be a viable style...There's plenty of examples of games that are "cartoony" and do well.
However the future road map of the game, the lore, and the world-building would suggest that anything that resembles "kid-like" is not the ideal fit for telling the stories we want to tell. But like everything else we do, it's all subject to change, haha. Maybe we'll end up super-cartoony on the next set!
Bottomline: With the pending release of Untamed and the Mobile app soon after, we expect to soon have a lot more eyeballs looking at the game. We thought it would be the ideal time to improve the quality of the art to be more dramatic, expressive, and immersive. I was hoping for people to look at the cards less as "cards" and more as mini-portals into another world, where they catch a glimpse of a monstrous creature in its native habitat.
The great thing about Splinterlands is that the community is such a big part of development. Maybe we'll ditch the background art and put back the colored gradient. Or maybe instead of a dark background, I'll lighten it up and use a blur to contrast with the characters instead.
We'll continue to tweak and adjust.
And when we have time to take a breath, I'm sure we'll have additions and improvements to the Skins aspect of the game. I think it's cool to have different versions and styles of the same character.
I can appreciate the desire to go for the more mature looking art that's a decent objectiv. And untamed does strike me as more talented or sophisticated drawings. Still the first set (alpha-beta) just seemed to have a sort of cohesiveness that i may miss... it had a per splinter sort of branding. Obviously untamed has a very unique style but seems more branded all together.
And that brand seems to be dark on dark because of background. In my world of photography that would lend toward the subject / the art getting lost to the eyeball.
Also very excited about the mobile stuff... loved seeing you at steemfest and getting a glance at some of the design for that! Great job.
And with all this said what's really cool is that we always have skins!!
I think you have a good point re: the dark backgrounds.
I did go fiddle with the card files to compare, and I do think that less shading for the environment backgrounds may be a better way to go. So at this point, it's a question of whether we have time to re-tweak all the cards and still meet deadline, haha.
Guess we'll see. Maybe it will be a change we make after the release.
o.O Very nice.
have a coffee on me this morning :)
c[_]