Visual Research

As opposed to looking solely at what other games are doing, I wanted to look at professional artists for inspiration with my art style. I wanted to look at artists who use a darker sense of humour in their artwork. One of my first thoughts was an illustrator called Ralph Steadman.

Ralph Steadman is famous for his work with Hunter S. Thompson's book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He uses black ink to create, almost surreal, characters. In the book, the characters quickly become monsters in the midst of a drug frenzy, which Ralph captures perfectly. This is why I chose him. Although his monsters are human based, The hold a similar feel and humour to the ones I would like to see.

Ralph Steadman's Illustration for the book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

 Another artist which caught my interest was the comic book artist for Tank Girl and the current illustrator for the band Gorillaz, Jamie Hewlett. Hewlett uses a punky style and attitude to bring out a slightly more rebellious side to his illustrations. He uses simple character designs and often adds odd quirks and accessories to give clues to their character. I chose him for inspiration for this project because his simple cartoony style is easily adapted to the iOS platform and his style has the sort of attitude I want my game to have.

Hewlett's illustration of the character 2D from the trip-hop band Gorillaz

In my search for visual inspiration, I also wanted to see how monsters have been portrayed in the past. One particular era this happened in was the 1950's in B-Movie posters and comic books. These pieces of art are referenced and used as inspiration even today. Their desaturated, half-cartoon and often surreal style immediatly tells the viewer that the film or comic is about monsters. Incorporating some of this style, perhaps the colour style, into my app would be an awesome way of giving the player the immediate feeling that they are playing a monster game.

The promotional poster for the 1955 film, It Came from Beneath the Sea

The cover page from the 1951 comic book, Adventures into Weird Worlds: Vol. 3

After looking at a couple of artists and pieces of artwork, I wanted some inspiration for what my monsters might look like. I figured that the best place to start would be animals from real life. I did a very quick study from photograph to give myself an idea of the sort of shapes I might want to be looking at when creating my monsters.

A quick line study of a few animals I thought might be useful for "monsterfying"

Although there is a lot more research that needs to be done, both into visuals and gameplay, I feel that I have collected enough research to begin creating a rough draft of the design document.