Art & Design - Kongregate Developers Blog (Page 2)

Art & Design Oct 05, 2022
Tell the Truth, Even When You’re Lying, Part 2.

Notes on Narrative Design by Dan Tabayoyon, Lead Narrative Designer, Blood Vessels, Kongregate. You can find Part 1 here! I’d argue with most narrative design, the task of creating a narrative seems simple enough on the surface: You have an idea. You work to build a world or setting creating characters to live in that world, and create reasons the player experience matches the mechanics you’re introducing to the player. You build lore and story that makes sense for the framework of the game. A

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Art & Design Sep 16, 2022
Tell the Truth, Even When You’re Lying, Part One.

Notes on Narrative Design by Dan Tabayoyon, Lead Narrative Designer of BLood Vessels, Kongregate. “All stories are lies. But good stories are lies made from light and fire. And they lift our hearts out of the dust, and out of the grave.” ― Mike Carey, Lucifer, Vol. 11: Evensong I don’t know if anyone else has this problem, but when I go to the movies and the setting is someplace I’ve been to or know intimately, I’m immediately looking for landmarks, familiar places, streets I’ve stood on, pla

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Art & Design Sep 01, 2022
What it Takes to be a Product Manager Outside of the Typical Job Description

A Product Manager (PM) is a position that exists in countless industries and companies. PMs, regardless of their industry of employment, all have the same responsibility: guide a product’s development to their organization’s maximum potential. Across the board, the best Product Managers are excellent strategists, analysts, leaders, and decision-makers. The only real difference between them stems from their unique industry knowledge and passion for it. So, what is the first prerequisite to being

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Art & Design Dec 12, 2017
Fixing Your Game's Perceived Slowness with Elevators

Spending months on optimization only to realize your game still feels slow can be pretty demoralizing. Try as you might, eventually you’ll reach a point where the technical solutions are simply too expensive to justify. What do you do then? Your game still feels slow and players won’t accept it. Luckily you have other options. Let’s talk about elevators Wait, what do elevators have to do with video games? Loads! Trust me, this’ll make sense. Solving the problem of perceived slowness can be tric

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Game Development Apr 25, 2017
Juicy Beast: All the Tools We Use to Make Games

This week, we're hosting a guest blog post from Juicy Beast [http://juicybeast.com/blog/]! We receive a lot of emails about the tools we use to make our games, so we thought it’d be easier to just list them all here for you curious folks out there. Photoshop We mostly use Photoshop [http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html] for UI work and everything “branding” and “marketing”. It’s obviously a standard, so no news here. One trick we use a lot is “Generate > Image Assets [https://helpx.a

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Marketing Apr 13, 2017
Mobile Art Testing Guide

Should I Do a Marketing Art Test? Early marketing testing allows you to gain insights into how well your game's creative performs during player acquisition. There are two main reasons to run an art test: * The game’s art is not entirely decided and the team is looking for art direction. * To determine how marketable an established style is. It’s important to note that if you aren’t willing to change anything, it’s not worth running a test! What do I want to learn? Narrow down your art

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Art & Design Apr 06, 2017
Color in Video Games: How to Choose a Palette

Color is one of the most powerful tools you have when you’re designing a game. Colors can be engaging, helping to direct your players to whatever you think is most important. It can also be used to give subtle clues about the characters and their world. When used properly, color sets the tone of a game, tells you where you are, and where you need to go. But knowing where to start when creating a color palette can be difficult, so let’s break it down and go through this step by step. A brief ov

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Art & Design Mar 09, 2017
'Animation Throwdown' Live Drawing: Why Not Zoidberg?

Unfortunately, we had some issues with the live stream, so the video is choppy, but it gets much better around the 10:15 mark. Please bear with us! This week we're posting a video from a live drawing session we had with one of our artists from our game Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards [http://www.kongregate.com/games/Throwdown/animation-throwdown]. Frank Harmon, one of our senior artists on the team, talks about his artistic background and process while drawing Zoidberg from the show Fu

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Art & Design Jul 16, 2016
Creating an Art Style

What is “art” and why do I care? I don’t have what you might call an “artistic flare” for writing these, so bear with me. Much of what is said here will be geared towards video games, but it still applies to other forms of art. In my work as Studio Art Director at Ultrabit, I often have to tell artists to change their art to fit the goals of our project. This task creates a level of anxiety and uncertainty for most artists. You’re taking them out of their comfort zone and possibly creating a fee

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