Art Book
“Hey Chris! We should make a beautiful looking adventure game where everything is hand animated and painted. Imagine bringing this classic Don Bluth style to modern consoles and platforms.” “Sounds like a great idea Ben!” “Can you draw?” “No… can you?” “No…” “But it can’t be that hard. I’ll throw together some sketches and see where we get.” “...let’s get some artists.”
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The Little Acre & © Pewter Games Studios. Licensed by Curve Digital Publishing Limited.
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Not experienced the adventure yet? The Little Acre is available for digital download on PC and Consoles
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Contents Introduction
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Artists
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Sketches and Concepts
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The Animation Process
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Characters
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Environments
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Posters
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Artist’s Miscellany
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Pewter Games Studios was founded in 2013, and is based in Dublin, Ireland. The Little Acre is their ďŹ rst title. If you don't like mild spoilers we strongly recommend that you go and complete The Little Acre ďŹ rst. We won't accept responsibility for your curiosity.
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Artists Edward Duff Kate Clavin Lucy Toner Maria Aurora Rodriguez Julie Rush Sean Cunningham Sinead O’Regan Kayleigh Scullion Niamh Skelly
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Team Banner 1. Initial Sketch
2. ReďŹ ne Linework
3. Final Colour and Polish
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Sketches and concepts
Early sketches of the farmstead. The environments of The Little Acre are designed with camera movements in mind. We plot out the focal points of the area at this early stage.
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A storyboard of The Little Acre’s opening cutscene
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Early sketches of Merr
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Early sketches of the Illusion Monster
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Concept sketches for Bugsy
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Character height sketch
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Arthur concept sketch
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Concept sketch for Arthur’s Machine
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The Animation process
All our animations begin with a rough sketch like this one of Adian getting out of bed. Here we’re looking to get the right feel and movement for each step of the action.
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All our animations begin with a rough sketch like this one of Aiden getting out of bed. Here we’re looking to get the right feel and movement for each step of the action.
Once the action is working we then make another pass. Here any mistakes in the drawing are fixed – a missing eyebrow or a crooked hand for instance.
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Finally, the drawings are coloured and shaded.
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A family reunion - the animation process from concept to completion.
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Smears make the character, or parts of the character, stretch out across the screen for a frame or two, “smearing� them across the screen. When played at full speed it will look like the character has moved so quickly they became a blur.
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Multiples, as the name implies, involve making multiple drawings of the character or a part of them on the same frame. This also helps to give the impression of speed. For example, if a character fumbles with an object and they frantically move to grab it, the animator might draw four or ďŹ ve hands for a few frames.
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Characters
Character sheets help the animators ensure they stay ‘on model’. These reference sheets help provide continuity of colour, size, appearance and expressions. This is essential in traditional animation because the character is redrawn every frame. This redrawing could potentially lead to little mistakes in the character’s features.
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The denizens of ClonďŹ ra charted by size
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Environments
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Posters
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The Little Acre 1.0 circa 2013
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The artist’s miscellany
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Thank you for checking out The Little Acre art book (not to mention also buying the game)! This was the first title that our studio has ever shipped, and as such we put in a lot of care and a lot of work, and learned a whole lot along the way. Hopefully you can see some of this through the artwork above! The Little Acre’s animation was hand-drawn, which means that every frame is a separate drawing. We used this technique for all the characters, as well as most of the effects in the game. It was pretty labour intensive, but we were left with something visually unique and interesting, and to us that made it all worth it. One of the things you’ll probably notice is how there are two art styles to the game, due to the nature of how we wanted to convey the idea of travelling to another universe. What this meant was that we needed two versions of the main characters – one standard, and one isometric. The isometric world is also where things get stranger, sometimes being described as a ‘Miyazaki’ world. While this was a nice idea which helped us emphasise the fact that Aidan and Lily weren’t in Kansas anymore (in case it’s not obvious, they were never actually in Kansas), it also ended up causing a headache for the animators who had to create the 8-directional movement animations required for Aidan and Lily - twice. Nevertheless, they managed to pull it off and the game is better off for it. Just don’t be surprised if we don’t do anything that stupid in future. We'd like to thank our artists so much for all their hard work on bringing The Little Acre to life. Also, on behalf of everyone at Pewter Games thank you for supporting us. Really, you da bestest.