Tetris 3D Platformer Pitch - Final Art

The second round of sketches from my previous post really resonated with the EA team, but they did notice that the tetrimino shapes had taken a little bit of a back seat to the Russian motifs. They asked us to see if we couldn't make they're presence a little more even. They definitely had a point. We needed to make sure that no matter where you looked in the game, it was obvious you were in a Tetris inspired world.

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 I love it when victories from early sketches make a come back. Tetris Snake!

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It's amazing how despite using the same template, the two sets of color ideations I got to create turned out so differently. We kept the same architecture and general shapes, but with just a color change and a few other element changes, we got something so much different. After working with a super limited palette (above) that was very beautiful and in my opinion much more Russian, we had to come up with something that felt like we were taking it in a substantially new direction, but with the same stuff. Above, we gave everything a very hard, edgy look that was supported by the limited color palette and a liberal use of black. Below, we introduced a lot of organic and verdant colors which made things feel a bit softer, although we didn't round the edges at all. We also squashed the castle a little in the wide shot and thickened up and simplified the fields of blocks. The winding river adds a lot of playfulness too. Naturally, the playful child-like character adds a lot more levity than the animal spirit character from above.

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I would have never seen this assignment coming when I first started at Brain Zoo nor would I expect to get one like this again soon. We had so much freedom and support from EA, it was great. They also gave us an inordinate amount of time to develop this stuff from what I'm used to, but the end results speak for themselves. I should also add that while I usually act as the sole art director, this time I worked very closely with the project lead, Tony Vasquez. He really pushed me to break away from typical genre conventions so that the Tetris elements didn't feel tacked on and kept reminding us to try the unexpected. Since the project was so blue sky, he also really helped me to refine my ideas so that it wasn't just a smorgasbord of concepts in each piece. Despite all the visual elements, you can see a clear destination in each piece. Congrats to all involved!

Tetris 3D Platformer Pitch - Sketch Phase

I now have the opportunity to share some ideas I generated for a proposal to make Tetris into a story based platform game for EA. Before the hardcore gamers get upset, we certainly meant to keep the core Tetris gameplay that has survived the ages, however, my team and I were tasked with developing a Tetris world where a character would go on some kind of adventure and along the way, play a lot of Tetris. Obviously, this sounds very vague, but I love these projects the most. This is when they're at the height of possibility.

We started with a couple of key words - adventure, character, fun, environment, castle, epic. From there I began my ideation. We wanted to remain pretty obvious in our inclusion of tetrimino shapes in the landscape and like the nature of the original game, there was a lot of destruction and building. I originally started with a very Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider take of exploring these fantasy landscapes filled with castles and some cataclysmic disaster was causing the world to break apart (into tetriminos of course).

Usually in pitches, you want to deliver 3 different ideas, so if the first one was a standard treasure hunting/castle climbing adventure, then the next one had to be a little different. Since tetriminos are building blocks essentially, we were inspired to develop landscapes that were inspired by DNA strands,  molecules, and as you can see, crystalline structures.

It came up that the top crystal sketch didn't really have any visible tetriminos, so I incorporated them as veins inside the crystals that pulsed with energy.

For a while, I was just developing my concepts as environments that had tetrimino shapes in them that the player would travel through, so to start something new, I considered using them as a mode of transportation through the environments.

In our second phase, we developed our ideas with more of a fairytale  in mind and the EA team made a great suggestion to add a Russian influence to it. I've never been a huge fan, but I'm familiar with the game, but I'd totally forgotten that Tetris is a Russian game. Anyone remember these?

Our research into Russian art, architecture and folk lore led to a fresh new direction.

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Russian minarets became a recurring shape in everything. In all of the following stages, we ended up incorporating some of the patterns and shapes we'd found in our research. Usually, I want the story elements to be absolutely perfect, but for once, we intentionally kept the story very vague. This helped us stay away from genre expectations and would allow the EA team to project whatever story they developed onto the designs we provided.

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Once I'd drawn trees with minaret buds on the top, the remaining concepts all displayed plant like elements.

I should mention that after our initial brainstorming session, we decided to deliver work in a template consisting of a landscape that was a wide shot, a medium shot, and a close shot of one style of environment. You'll notice that the first two concepts don't have much in the way of the classic tetrimino shapes. We discussed at length with EA all the possibilities that might exist for incorporating tetrimino shapes. What if they were like DNA strands and molecules, making up the entire game world, but not visible to the eye. What if playing triggered an event that sent you into a Tetris game. For example, what if you came to a door or wall that stood in your way, and you had the power to control the tetriminos, you could stack the wall/door tetriminos and collapse them, clearing your way. What if they acted as magical glyphs that acted as magical barriers that had to be destroyed to progress. As things were becoming more and more abstract, we tried to simplify our ideas even more so that exploration would just trigger some fantastical event that would take you into a Tetris game. In the concept below, the idea was that the minaret from the concept above would open up like a flower and emit a 3D column of tetriminos. Enter Tetris Game Challenge.

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As we developed more and more ideas, it allowed us to propose new ways of playing Tetris in 3 dimensions. The column of tetriminos could be rotating, or you could rotate the column so that the tetriminos that fell could be placed anywhere along the circumference of the cylinder.

Pepe and Lucas - The story continues...

Now you've seen virtually all the pre-production work that I was involved in to help bring Pepe and Lucas to life. However, we've created a few teaser pieces to expand the story in the future. I've already mentioned that in the world of Pepe and Lucas, all forms of performance entertainment other than magic have lost favor under the control of the Magician's Guild. Consequently, all the practitioners of those arts have been pushed to the fringes of society. Keeping that in mind, we wanted to expand the story to the world outside of Starlight City by sending the unlikely trio of Pepe, Lucas, and the Magician on a road trip. Their goal would be to escape the clutches of the ruling Magician's Guild and bring popularity back to clowning, miming, and all other entertainment forms in danger of becoming lost arts. Their trip would focus on returning to the places from their past that shaped them into the entertainers that they have become.

Traveling Circus

The traveling circus where Pepe grew up and learned his craft. Much like his gadgets, this multi-tiered big top on wheels is full of hidden gadgets and rooms. Driving from town to town putting on a show, waning audiences have caused it to fall into disrepair on the outskirts of town. What can our heroes do?

Mime Training Center

B/W study.

The massive rock garden surrounding the Mime Training Center, a school shrouded in mystery as well as mist. It lies abandoned at the top of massive balancing rocks. Only one with the gift can enter and only a master can leave.

I did a lot of b/w studies to get a sense of mood and atmosphere as we were really trying to establish a world that was full of epic places that were once great, but were now abandoned. I loved the middle column that had the most supernatural lighting, but we didn't want to introduce anything "magical" since that was the Magician's stock in trade, even if his power relied on smoke and mirrors.

At the center, a giant shrine to the deceased founders of miming. With no one left to care for it, the school is being absorbed by the wilderness.

Prop House

The prop house where the magician grew up dreaming big and learning the secrets of illusion making. Hard times have hit here as well. As time has passed, the expanding city has built a dense network of freeways over the area, leaving a once prosperous area forgotten.

Inside, the Magician makes his way through a surreal labyrinth of sets and props to the place where he decided to become the man he is.

I hope you like these pieces as much as I enjoyed making them. Hopefully, the future will bring further adventures into the world of Pepe and Lucas.

Pepe and Lucas - The People, The Monument, and some birds.

In doing research for Pepe and Lucas, we looked at a lot of short films for ideas on pacing, story, and how "big" to make it. One of the things I've noticed with shorts is that there's usually only 2 to 3 characters involved in the main action and rarely a lot of characters, let alone a city of bystanders. Look at how Pixar's One Man Band and Presto both starred entertainers putting on a show, but with few onlookers or with an implied audience. Budget is obviously a consideration, but too many side characters can pull you away from the main drama. One thing that I've noticed about most short films is that with so little time, they tend to feel very immediate. So, we started off with the idea that we'd never really get a good look at our pedestrians and that the cameras would avoid them for the most part. They'd be blurred silhouettes of generic models with jackets and hats. However, like so many projects, you can't always control how they develop if you want to put in your best effort. The story department realized early on that we couldn't avoid showing people. Unlike Presto, we weren't sitting in the dark with the audience and because of the nature of the entertainment duel, there weren't the typical pauses for an audience to make clapping or cheering noises. As the battle heated up and the clown and mime started chasing each other with increasing amounts of destruction, people needed to get out of the way. It was most obvious in an early scene when the clown enters the square. Without people, how would we know that the mime was more popular than the clown? No matter how we scaled up or down the square, it always looked huge. Even with the giant monument I created for the center and trees and lamp posts and outdoor restaurant seating, with just two characters it just looked massive. There needed to be people to give us an accurate sense of scale. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that we would have to populate it with more people - pedestrians walking in the background, even an occasional car, and a crowd in the foreground.  As a result we needed designs for models, but within a limited time and budget. As you can see below, I did several sketches for men and women based on the mime's anatomy so that we could reutilize the model and rig as well as keep the same stylized anatomy. However, even those changes were a little too drastic and eventually, I painted over the mime and the clown and gave them different hair, mustaches and different clothes, but left the actual anatomy untouched. We also drew upon other stylized characters we've created for other internal projects and gave them new wardrobes and hair.

The Bartender. He had a much bigger part in the original storyline, but is almost entirely hands in the final version. Another victim of the crunch, we used a differently proportioned model to build off of  and I brought over as many of the most important traits as I could. In the end it worked out just fine since we only ever see the hands anyways and they remained huge and menacing.

The Monument. As I mentioned earlier, we needed to fill the square a little bit so the background behind the clown and mime had some visual interest. My research into monuments led me to a lot of obelisk type forms that were tall and thin. However, most of our shots are at about eye level looking at the horizon, so all we ever saw was the base or a thin pole in the distance. This led me to shorten and squash the proportions. Everything became wider and the equestrian figure mounted at the top much larger in scale. You can actually see it in several shots.

 

I paid homage to one of Brain Zoo's original short film character's Percy by making him the figure of power atop the monument. I found a few places to place the Brain Zoo logo on the there as well as the manholes on the streets and even on the coinage. As soon as the clown car was approved, chickens became a much bigger part of the short film, as an element that gets brought in to add an extra level of ridiculousness. It even made it onto the film poster.

Since crowds of people take forever to render and animate, we looked for other sources of movement to add energy to the backgrounds, so I did several designs for city birds. This was one of the last concepts I created and by this time the story was fairly fleshed out. I knew that it needed to fit into this nostalgic, pseudo-European,  cartoony, wonky world that went beyond just mild stylization, so I tried not to make any of them look too recognizable as doves or pigeons. Just birds.

We went with the below design as it had just the right level of ridiculousness.

Pepe and Lucas - The Clown Car - A prop full of props.

As the action heated up in Pepe and Lucas, we introduced Pepe's clown car. Originally, the battle would have had a few more levels of escalation. Pepe would have begun battle with a mallet, then used a small canon, then a gigantic pie launching canon, followed by the clown car, then maybe transformed into a mech to do battle with the mech the mime would imagine. However, all that action would have added several minutes and would have really upset the pacing. After all, we originally intended to have something shorter in the 5 minute range and we still ended up with something in the 8 minute range. We pared down the action scenes but kept the climactic battle where the clown, as a last resort uses a clown car to challenge the mime. The mime, not to be outdone, mimes a robot mech, and they do battle. 

By the time the clown introduces the clown car, the weapons each character uses have progressed from the standard props associated with clowns and mimes to something that might fit right into a scifi movie. The clowns car was designed like the tiny car we're all familiar with , but it would have tons of Inspector Gadget arms holding various clown weapons so it would literally be "armed to the teeth." When I started designing it, the pie launcher was still a go, so I used another food weapon and introduced an egg firing gatling gun. To make it more ridiculous, I added a chicken to man the gun. We tried a range of cars to see what would look most natural in our evolving environment and story. I spent a fair amount of time trying ideas inspired by 40's, 50's and 60's European cars. I new it needed to have a touch of old world European nostalgia and by this time I was looking at a lot of vintage toys when designing for the clown. Looking at toys or models of an era is a great way to see how things have been simplified and stylized to their essence, but still maintain an element of fun. It was important to be inspired by reality, but not just to stylize reality, but to make it fit the alternative world we developed. I eventually settled on a VW Bug inspired look, but the element that finally clinched it for me was when I drew the bumper around the entire car. It looked just like a bumper car. A bumper car totally epitomized the rough banging around and jerky movements I imagined for Pepe's transportation.

I did a fair number of color variations for the car that would have matched Pepe's outfit, but it seemed to be better to have the car feel like a separate item with it's own color set. I kept the yellow from the scarf, but introduced the green compliment to really keep the focus on Pepe's head.

One of the few times I've had to design the underside of something.

Each element that popped out of the car needed an explanatory drawing.

It almost wasn't worth designing the balls, since that's a standard design and color set for actual juggling balls, but they were primary colors and it worked with Pepe's clothing colors. Since we were stylizing so much, and wear and tear and grunge were so much a part of the Pepe's identity, I paid special attention to the rust patches and dinks on the car as well as on the juggling balls. I wanted those touches to still retain a graphic quality to them, often so that they could look worn without losing some of the color vibrancy you might get from introducing smudges and dirt.

The chicken body didn't require much exploration, but I did take some time to work on the eyes and see if they should look more animal or more intelligent. Somewhere in there a Prussian helmet entered the fray.

Of course a clown car can fit buckets of other clowns in it, but in Pepe's situation, they're all robot clones of himself that work in unison to overpower the mime.

And that is how the task of designing one prop became a the task of developing several props. ;)

WHAT! GRIDSMASHERS AGAIN!

 Yup. Some more Gridsmasher artwork. It takes a lot to make an episode.

Above: Smash Stadium. This was the first concept to be developed for the show. It's probably the most important environment in the whole show. This is where the Gridsmash games take place - a giant floating stadium in space, complete with giant navigational rockets and spinning gyroscope. Add in a little Speed Racer Movie crazy light show and holographic adds and you've got it. The little dots on top are the bleacher pods that fly in from various planets.

 Not the most exciting, but I thought I'd attach a breakdown/callout sheet. While I try to do the most explaining that I can in a concept and the modelers I work with are quite talented, sometimes your intent is just not always that obvious, or in this case, a profile or 3/4 view leaves room for incorrect interpretation. I knew that the field would be a big oval, but I designed the base to be a big circle with a donut rim. I also find that drawing the orthographic views often reveals flaws in my design or shapes that are impossible to model and have it look like I intended in multiple views. People, it pays to take this step. Your 3D team will thank you.

Below: I submitted 3 ideas for the Smash Stadium with an emphasis on rockets, light shows, massiveness, holographic advertisements.

Fold out teletrons!

Announcer Droid

The Announcer Droid was designed as a pseudo narrator to explain the game to the viewers. It was thought of as part of the stadium, so it was determined to be a mechanical robot from the start as opposed to a biological or humanoid character.

  We eventually started adding a view human characteristics - eye cameras, the voice box where the mouth is, and rocks where legs might be.

We tweaked the designs and removed the rockets in favor of a little variety and wackiness. I kind of thought of it as a big shell with all sorts of hidden mechanical appendages that could come out of portals and hatches. Navigational paddles allowed for flight and gesticulating.

At one end of the grid field, Grizz would observe Johnicco's progress from his secret room at the top of a huge observation tower. The tower base didn't change much, but we went through several iterations for the top as we fiddled with the scale of the field and as the actual physical interior the puppet team created was being developed.

 At one point, Grizz would have his own little observation pyramid.

 Then it needed to be bigger.

Then the top became more pyramidal. We ended up placing the Gridsmasher logo dead center and putting Grizz's quarters as the top layer of windows.