Domestic mobile games are walking on a road that foreign masterpieces have walked, relying on mature production processes and ever-changing hardware equipment, large manufacturers continue to pile up high costs in the audiovisual performance of games, thereby squeezing the living space of small and medium-sized teams. And the result may also be obvious, avoiding the game art arms race Nintendo and a cadre of independent teams relying on the gameplay of the screen to stand so far, but also a large number of works that rely on differentiated art styles to achieve curve overtaking.
For domestic two-dimensional mobile games, this principle is universal. Based on the game characteristics of collecting characters, the investment of two-dimensional mobile game manufacturers in game art often accounts for the majority, and a picture circulated on the Internet last year vividly depicts the development status of character standing.
In the face of the continuous high cost and increasing homogenization of the two-dimensional game art, the breakthrough is imminent. At present, manufacturers offer two development paths, one is fully 3D, which sets another threshold for the subsequent entrants - the technical threshold; the other is the aforementioned style differentiation.
The "Jump Traveler" developed by "Binary Game" provides a good example.
"JumpIng Traveler" is an alien planet cute girl tide play wind pixel mobile game, the game brings together a variety of different attributes of the planet civilization and a variety of genetic alien alien alienation of the alien cute girl. The game does not use the japanese character design commonly found on the market, but combines American cartoons, Japanese celluloid and contrast styles to create a unique art style.
In the "Search for Someone to Start the Test" that ended some time ago, the game received a lot of praise, during which many players praised the game's excellent graphics and comfortable UI. Even though it's still some time away from the game's official launch, at least its art style has proven to be feasible.
So, how is the artistic "differentiation" of "The LeapIng Traveler" realized?
Starting from the science fiction genre
"When the project was established, I was always obsessed with what kind of art style to do, what kind of proportion and direction to set, such as Hanfeng or Japanese wind..." In the official interview program, the head of game art Mushroom said, and the "Doranai" drawn by sudden inspiration became the team's opportunity to determine the style.
Game character "Doranai"
Different from the Japanese character designs on the market that continue to increase in the sophistication of characters and pictures, the decoration and face details of "Doranai" are not complicated, and the use of more intense neon purple tones with visual stimulation, the design is simple, the color is bold, in the official's own words, it is not limited to the current popular two-dimensional art style, but boldly combines American cartoons.
In GameRes' view, this style is somewhat similar to the "Promea" produced by Trigger Society, and most of the representative works of director Hiroyuki Imaishi also have strong traces of American cartoons, and in terms of the similarity between "Leap Traveler" and "Promea", their biggest commonality is the use of color.
On "Promea", next "The Traveler of The Leap"
From the actual picture of the game and the promotional map, it is not difficult to find that the "Jump Traveler" screen has many hues and high saturation, and often appears some exaggerated color matching to enhance visual stimulation, which is easy to remind people of the classic theme in video games - cyberpunk.
For example, the cyan and pink colors commonly found in the game's promotional images, in fact, these two colors are common colors in RGB misalignment, and they are widely used in faulty artworks, while the latter is a classic cyberpunk visual element.
However, "LeapIng Traveler" does not simply position itself as a cyberpunk theme, but a broader futuristic fantasy and space universe, based on which the game explores a variety of art schemes to express this "futuristic feeling".
The first is the use of color. "Leap Traveler" is one of the few two-dimensional mobile games on the market that uses fluorescent colors, which are also known as neon colors, which are known for their high saturation, which has the effect of strengthening visual stimulation and highlighting the avant-garde sense of the work. But as the saying goes, "red with green, racing bullshit", the more colorful the color, the more attention is paid to the actual color collocation.
In the official publicity map and video can see a variety of colorful, strong impact but good perception of the picture, it requires artists to have a high grasp of the primary and secondary relationship of the picture, the brightness and darkness of the color.
In addition to the "Doranai" mentioned above, there are also many character designs in "The Jump Traveler" with bold colors and excellent effects. For example, the "Dolly" in the picture below uses high color tones such as green and blue with neutral colors such as black and white to reconcile the vision, so that the character can be cool and eye-catching. One of the characters in the game even adopts the classic "acidic" design, giving the audience a psychedelic and avant-garde visual experience through liquid metal + bright colors.
"Dolly"
It should be said that the bold use of colors (many colors, large differences, and high brightness) of "Jump Traveler" has achieved a good effect, whether it is the game screen or character design has a fairly high degree of recognition, and successfully drawn its own position in similar games.
Second, the widespread use of cyberpunk elements. Brightly lit city night scenes, bulky flying machines, loading progress bars... Many common cyberpunk elements can be seen in the game, but the most used is the failure art, which originates from the image errors caused by the failure of electronic equipment, which is manifested as color misalignment, a large number of horizontal or vertical lines, and square color blocks.
The interface design and interaction effects of "The Leap Traveler" use a lot of fault art:
In addition, there are continuous upward flowing bars, flashing "false vision" from time to time, and with playful and cheerful electronic music, the main interface of the game is more flexible.
Third, modeled on the game UI made of mobile phones. Yes, all of The Jump Traveler's game systems are cleverly placed in a virtual mobile desktop.
View of the main interface at a glance
It is novel enough, easy for smartphone users to understand and get started, the shortcut application below the mobile phone screen corresponds to the common functions of the game, the left desktop is centrally placed battle levels, the middle of the game character is focused on exposure, and the right is some scattered game modules.
This set of UI design also reflects the boldness and innovation of the "Leap Traveler" art, it effectively splits the more complex and refined game modules, adopts the way of scenario-based design to reduce the cost of player understanding, while taking into account the needs of game design, game announcements, event store displays, matters to be handled, event countdown, clean and refreshing main interface...
Further, the UI design modeled on mobile phones actually fits the science fiction theme of the game, and tools such as smartphones that condense a number of technologies naturally have scientific and technological attributes.
On the whole, "Leap Traveler" accurately cuts into the theme of science fiction in the positioning of the game art style, and integrates American cartoons on the common Japanese two-dimensional elements on the market, cleverly using fluorescent colors, cyberpunk and other science fiction elements, thus opening up its own path.
But this is not enough to please the players of the two-dimensional game, and the game also has to delve into new tricks in character design.
Spread out by the game setting
The Jump Traveler is a mobile game that explores multiple planetary civilizations. An unprecedented catastrophe engulfed human civilization, the earth was tragically disintegrated, and the surviving humans began to explore other planets and try to find the truth of the disaster.
This story sounds a bit familiar, it seems to be a common script of space + wasteland, but in some details, "Jump Traveler" still makes a special feature and runs it through the design of the entire game, such as - "Jump".
According to official information, some humans can survive because they have a ability called "jump", in addition to humans there are many species with "jump" ability, they are collectively known as "jump traveler", the player's duty is to use the "jump" ability to re-weave together the fragments of the planet scattered in the universe.
The official concept of "transition", in addition to running through the main plot of the game, has also been applied to some actual game functions. For now, it has two major embodiments, one is the transition system, the player can reduce the energy of the traveler through this function, and after use, it will return all the resources consumed by the traveler's upgrade and energy level, so that the player does not have to worry about the cost of investing in a character, and can boldly try different lineup combinations, which can be described as the gospel of collecting and cultivating players.
Robots that cannot reduce energy, the official implementation of the concept of "transition" is quite meticulous
The other is the character's own conversion ability, as the official said, "transition" refers to "a kind of ability to convert between different dimensions", from the three-dimensional world into the two-dimensional world, the specific performance in the game is the "binary game" for each game character are designed pixel villain + full body vertical painting + illustration three forms, pixel villain equipped with a full set of skills + interaction of the full set of actions, vertical painting is the use of strong interactivity, rich action details live2D animation, scene design also draws realistic + pixel two styles.
"Jump" + disaster also brings another layer of settings to the game, in the world of "Jump Traveler", the species affected by the explosion will enter a chaotic state, the species with the ability to jump and successfully fused will become xenomorphs, they can be animals or plants, and even gems, metals and other inorganic objects, and according to the degree of fusion, the game also designed a role with different Furry concentrations, which can refer to the following meme.
From left to right, the more pronounced the physical characteristics of humans
According to the words of netizens, "Jump Traveler" meets the needs of Furry enthusiasts of varying degrees at one time.
The terrier is for entertainment only
But focusing on the design of a single character, "LeapIng Traveler" still has its own insistence, "binary game" does not blindly follow the vertical drawing design trend rolled up on the market, but try to reduce the "fancy" parts around the character's body, so that players can project perspective and emotion to the character itself.
In a sense, the ever-expanding scene information in the character drawing is to serve the character, which can convey more character information with the help of a single picture, such as the character's backstory, personality characteristics, etc., making the original monotonous character drawing become a sense of story.
If you do not use these "extra" scene elements, the game wants to highlight the characteristics of the character by relying on the character drawing alone, it needs to have a unique and clever design. Take "Doranai" in "Leaping Traveler", "Binary Game" has a good grasp of the essence of two-dimensional character design.
In order to highlight the character's "cute point", "Doranai" hair is made of jelly-like material, if you look closely, you will find that there are fine sequins flashing on it, cat's claws can be enlarged in proportion, and the meat pads appear more Q-bomby and pink.
What surprised GameRes was that the "binary game" made a corresponding character setting and game positioning around the characteristics of the "Doranai" cat.
"Doranai" will summon a strong creature to replace her on the battlefield, and in the character introduction file, it will also emphasize that she likes to "fantasize" in the room, which is quite in line with the cat's leisurely and self-racial characteristics.
In order to strengthen the connection between players and game characters, "Leap Traveler" also designed a chat system and a home system, but it is different from the common two-dimensional games on the market. Thanks to the relationship between the game UI imitation mobile desktop, the communication and interaction between players and game characters are more logical, and the home system "Jump Traveler" is quite a community, pixel villains in the free action, according to the official introduction, the future will continue to expand the community, and even increase the free decoration of the building interior, when the entire home system will be more like a real game character living place.
In addition, as a two-dimensional mobile game, "Leap Traveler" tries to further strengthen the connection between players and game characters, so that players' choices can have an impact on the growth of game characters. The game has deliberately designed a differentiated character attribute system, players can cultivate the attribute values of travelers through the story-oriented roguelike mode and other play modules, and different attribute preferences will unlock different stories.
In fact, the improvement of the two-dimensional mobile game character system of "LeapIng Traveler" cannot be called subversive, but it does give its own thinking in the surging army of two-dimensional mobile games, rather than blindly meeting the existing game design.
This idea can also be used in the game's gameplay design, although "Jump Traveler" uses a more common casual placement gameplay, but the "binary game" still adds a lot of micro-innovative elements to it, such as the cultivation system of each season rotation, adding interactive elements such as puzzle solving in the level map, which reduces the player's liver while increasing the playability of the game.
epilogue
In the face of the increasing volume of two-dimensional mobile game art, is "differentiation" a miracle? The jump traveler's answer is "yes," but not all.
First, the trick should not be too niche. Differentiation is to avoid a head-on collision with the two-dimensional mobile game of the big factory, but also can not be too sword to take the side and limit themselves to a niche group, in recent years, the popularity of sci-fi themes such as cyberpunk provides a certain guarantee for "LeapIng Traveler" to find the blue ocean, from the current market reaction, its art style also has a fairly high acceptance.
Second, the strange trick must be effective to be called strange. The differentiation of the two-dimensional mobile game art can not be limited to a single point of visual impact, it needs to be the overall packaging of visual effects, and the game content is properly integrated together, in this regard, "Jump Traveler" also does a remarkable job, it closely relies on science fiction themes, world view settings, the formation of a complete set of art style.
Third, the art trick can not rely on only a skin, it also needs to have game content that can support players to play. At present, "Jump Traveler" is still in full swing, from the first test, the official each update can add more interesting playable content on the basis of listening to the opinions of players, such as a variety of modes of Roguelike gameplay, home system, etc. It is reported that the game will open a second round of testing in the near future, believing that it can bring more surprises to players.
GameRes also believes that in the foreseeable wave of new two-dimensional works, we will see more "differentiated" games like Jump Traveler.