STEVE ABEYTA

Although a game on mobile, Skyfall had one of the most complex and interesting back stories I've had the pleasure to work with. Story influenced art, and conversely, imagery informed story. The back and forth between fiction-making and aesthetic design was an interesting part of pre-production. The pink object you see here is an ancient relic referred to as a "pillar". These objects are later learned to be physical manifestations of magic that ancestors created to incarcerate an ancient evil.

RPG on mobile for mass-market offered a lot of design and aesthetic challenges. Legibility of key information had to be considered. Characters were designed to have a signature silhouette that makes a few things instantly legible at small scale - Class (Rogue, Warrior, Mage), Armor, and Race. Thin limbs allowed a light armored character to appear weak. Large hands and feet let users see the gauntlets and footwear at small scale. This was an exercise in form vs function to create a unique style.

The designers of Skyfall wanted to convey a LOT of information during exploration and combat. The solution was to create a consistent language of objects, armor, icons, and environmental props that contained features about their attributes. Color, saturation, texture, and form are used to convey race, class, or purpose. This language permeates through environments, characters, armor, objects, and UI.

There were multiple races in Skyfall and each one had its own backstory and culture. So, each race needed to have its architecture, armor, and weapons defined. Seelie Elves: High elves with incredible skill and craftsmanship. Unseelie Elves: Highly skilled forest dwellers, but chaotic in nature and more wild than the Seelie Elves. Empire: Boastful Humans that represent their grand kingdom in exploration and battle. Barbarians - Men of the plains that pillage and repurpose all they can acquire.

Enemies shared the same basic treatment of proportion, lines, and material. A falloff/spec/self-illum shader was developed to let all characters pop at small scale. Along with a lighting rig that included a strong rim light, characters were able to pop from their environment backgrounds.

To reinforce the fiction, I personally created traveling screens that were shown during long load sequences. The colors are muted and faded like an old canvas painting. This is to reinforce the epic sense of your adventure and worked well to provide a backdrop that made tutorial text legible if necessary.