Buildings Style
The building choices of this game were largely inspired by existing buildings in real-time strategy games, the building designs were created with greek and medieval concepts in mind to suit the game's overall atlantean theme, while the building art style is pixel art. Building inspirations were gathered from online resources, to outline initial designs, which were refined and added to the the game as the current building design.
- The barracks in the existing game of Age of Empires II was used as the primary inspiration for look of the barracks which can be seen in the first image below.
- This resembles castles in the real world, which can be seen in the second and third images below. These were also used as reference when initially designing the barracks.
- The last image below was used as a reference for an atlantian colour scheme for the atlantean themed barracks.
- Initially, the studio had decided on a top-down view of the game, so preliminary sketches and designs for potential barracks buildings in the game were created which suited this art style. These sketches and designs consist of the first four images.
- However, in the week 4 studio, it was decided that by the design committee that the game perspective would be isometric, so new sketches were created for the barracks to suit a medieval theme as well as an Atlantian theme which can be seen in the images below. A 3:1 aspect ratio (3 pixel length by 1 pixel height) was chosen to create the design.
- For the isometric barracks, the four post design for the barracks was chosen over the six post barracks in the initial top-down design mainly for simplicity when designing the barracks as well as conformity with most isometic building designs.
- Due to lack of clarity with some of the design aspects of the game, in the week 5 studio, the aspect ratio was standardised to 2:1 to ensure design consistency; additionally, sprite tiles were discussed to be approximately 20 x 20 pixels, so the isometric barracks needed to be redesigned.
- The current design is not the final design; however, it was created with a 2:1 aspect ratio and a size of 200 x 200 pixels was chosen for the barracks.
- The barracks and sprite integration will be necessary to determine if the size of the barracks is appropriate with respect to the sprites and whether the design should be downsided for a more pixelated design.
- Additionally, the atlantean design of the barracks was chosen to suit the game's theme and a darker colour scheme was chosen to match the atmosphere "doom and gloom" to match the atomshere the studio wants to create for the game.
- Atlantis belongs to ancient Greek mythology and the architectural style of the drawings is taken from ancient Greek architecture.
- The first picture shows the Temple of Zeus, one of the largest temples in ancient Greece, built in 470 BC and designed by the architect Libon to honour Zeus, who lived on Mount Olympus, and although it was destroyed halfway through, the Corinthian column structure still stands and the ivory and gold statue of Zeus is located on the site of the ancient Roman Forum in the centre of Rome.
- At the beginning, Wenfeng Wang provided two sketches to choose from and, after discussion, continued in the direction of the second sketch.
- During the fifth week of studio, the game's UI design team discussed and specified a homogeneous standard as each designer's painting art style and colour shades differed, so the Atlantis city centre still needed some changes.
- This building will potentially be designed in the next sprint