Page 29 - Advertising Annual 57

Players traverse a paper world in Lumino City as they help Lume in her quest to find her grandfather. The art team built the entire world from physical materials and used tiny motors to power its moving parts.
researched how various visual artists simplify reality for paintings, prints and illustrations, borrowing aspects of the aesthetic tech­ niques they liked when they realized they didn’t need to animate every individual leaf of a tree to make it look like a tree. Like landscape artists, they could represent leaves in broad strokes. The team brought in architects and landscape artists to build an imaginary world that could actually exist, obeying natural laws. They also created an imaginary procession of three civilizations—the remnants of which can be found by players—as well as fictitious geography and geology for the abandoned island. The artists drew on this depth of story to create The Witness’s current appearance. Because of the intense level of story detail, creators expected the game creation to take six months. Instead, it took four years.
Lumino City
The illustration styles of indie games venture far from the look
of mainstream games, which Lumino City artist Luke Whittaker describes as a “synthetic aesthetic.” Instead of striving for reality in Lumino City, indie game developer State of Play created an entire paper city, through which protagonist Lume swings, walks, climbs and solves puzzles on a grand adventure to find her grand­ father. Game makers meticulously designed the paper city and had physical parts laser cut. They were left with “a mad pile of pieces, like a crazy jigsaw with no instructions,” as Whittaker describes it, which they pieced together into the city. They painted and colored it, sometimes using felt tip pens. The game makers developed an internally consistent palette for the city, even defining how stone, wood and roof tiles would look in their tiny world. They strung miniature LED lights on buildings and used tiny motors to power the set’s moving pieces.
Generally, indie game artists use a mix of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Maya, ZBrush and 3D­Coat. But because indie games include such a wide range of stories, budgets and aesthetics, designers sometimes use atypical programs—like State of Play’s use of Adobe Animate, previously called Flash. The end product is essentially an eight­hour interactive film. Lumino City’s game makers had to animate the character Lume almost frame by frame. After photographing a model of her in neutral lighting, they brought her to life through animation. From there, they added some visual noise and film grain and manipulated the depth of field with blur.
Lumino City’s team consisted of two to three people at various points over the course of the game’s creation; because the team was so tiny, Whittaker became director, artist, animator and model maker. His extensive arts background—he studied both lens­based media and new media production—came in handy for this project. Though Whittaker works in video games, his games betray his reliance on tactile, physical art making. One of State of Play’s smaller projects, INKS, is a pinball game in which the bumpers leak paint when players hit them, causing splattering and enabling the balls to leave thin trails of paint as they roll.
Unlike mainstream games funded by large companies, no standard funding model exists for indie games. Some of them have no funding and are simply passion projects, squeezed in around their creators’ full­time jobs. Others, made by indie companies, operate with relatively large budgets. Games can be privately funded or grant funded.
Initially self­funded, Lumino City’s game makers minimized their budget whenever possible. They rented a motion control camera
Communication Arts | commarts.com 31