In this little update on Project DogWalk we wanted to shine some more light on the artstyle of the game. All the inspirations, goals and constraints that is going into the "papercraft" style that we picked, and also just some insight into how we're going about it.

Low-Poly & Low Fidelity

First off, a little bit about the constraints we set. This is a short project with a small scope, so I wanted to pick an artstyle that reflects that. The lower the fidelity the less time is spent trying to make everything polished and fit together.
Hard low-poly silhouettes and simple flat normals can be embraced by all assets.

But at the same time we wanted to export all of our assets as seamlessly as possible from Blender to Godot. Making custom shaders and highly stylized rendering like in our previous projects would be extremely time consuming. So we stuck to PBR shading and lighting, even if this could end up a bit more costly in performance.

Early on I was looking at games like Jusant and Vane because they executed a low poly, stylized look with realistic PBR lighting.

Everything is Miniature and Paper!

The idea that brought all this together is to lean hard into a flat-surfaced miniature look. I stumbled onto the paper craft scenes from Kelly Pousette and fell in love with the style and how it works perfectly from one camera angle.

So no complex or high-poly geometry and baking because everything is folded/cutout paper. We can exaggerate low poly silhouettes and edges because it highlights how it is made of paper. The lighting is simple and realistic with standard materials since not much is needed from the assets to shine. Even how the paper pieces are not properly aligned or touching with each other can make it more believable.

The animation of the characters and movement in the environment is also at a lower frame-rate akin to stop motion. But more on that another time.

Our rigging capabilities and experience for this project are limited, so having complex deformations or facial animation is something we're steering away from. Our characters needed to be very simple, especially with their facial rigs.
Pinda (the kid) has simple dot eyes and a sticker mouth that can be swapped out any time. This makes it quite flexible to get big exaggerated expressions that go even outside of the silhouette of the head, while avoiding an expensive facial rig.

Chocomel (the dog) was supposed to be the same originally but we steered towards a Muppet-like head design with lots of ripped paper pieces. The jaw and all of the surrounding floppy bits (ears, hair, fur) is enough to communicate the exaggerated movement. In terms of emotion Chocomel is much more consistent: A big happy dog.

More Sources of Inspiration

Vivien, our Art Director for this project, has been sneaking in watercolor textures into her digital art whenever possible for "like a decade" and into Open Movies since Coffee Run. So now the time has come to indulge her mixed media obsession!
Let's hear it from her:

Picture book influences

The influences I called upon for this project include children's book illustrators like Mark Janssen and Brendan Wenzel. Their deceptively simple designs rock a lot of traditionally painted textures, that are collaged digitally. The papercut characters appear 2,5-dimensional thanks to occulusion and painted form shadows and are often placed in vast environments with immersive lighting.

Game influences

Another influence is the work of Rex Crowle (Tearaway, Knights and Bikes). His work is also very much inspired by arts and crafts, wonderfully collaged - childish, messy and complex at the same time.

His "anti-flex-y" design philosophy attempts to remove the barrier of players replicating it, so they can join in creating! As someone who started her art career in modding communities this resonated strongly. On that note...

Don't Starve was another really big influence on the art direction with its patchworky environments and over the top animations, even though we knew that ultimately we would go with 3D characters rather than having 2D characters in a 3D world.
AND we had to fight the urge of adding any kind of linework over the characters.
Very important.

Experimental reference

We also drew inspiration from personal projects, some of which we started years ago, often purely for the joy of experimenting!

One of those projects, that is currently on hold, is the "Moose Project".
This was the first time we tried mapping watercolor textures, painted based on unwrapped UV islands, onto 3D characters.
For the fur a bigger texture was mapped onto chunky fur cards, that were modeled in Blender.

The Moose Project proved some of the techniques we use for Project DogWalk valid so we could suggest them with more confidence to the team. We also hoped that this workflow would free up some time from Simon as a shading wizard and allow him to join more on the programming side.

Making stuff! Real stuff!!

So this is how a lot of our assets ended up being primarily designed in real life as painted paper-cutout models. The models are then photographed, taken apart and scanned. Some paint samples are also created specifically to become tileable.

In the exploration phase, but also now that we narrowed the look down, we explored the characters through a lot of painted clay sculpting and papercrafts to get a feel for the little details. It actually wasn't clear from the beginning, that they would be made of paper like the environment assets. We were also considering clay, porcelain, wood and other crafting materials!

The Work Continues

The progress on the art assets is going pretty strong. Most of them have a final design and the modeling process is progressing fast.

Some shading experiments also ended up very fruitful in giving the paper a fake rim to indicate thickness, as an alternative to solidifying every mesh.

Find out more in the Production Logs where we share all our latest progress, insight and early builds of the game.

We'll be back with more soon. Cheers!