ARTé: LUMIÈRE
ARTé: Lumière was conceptualized at Texas A&M's LIVE Lab in partnership with Triseum, to be part of our ARTé series. While games in the series share the same general subject matter (art history and art appreciation), each game is uniquely designed to present and enhance the educational content. With a similar timeline as Mecenas but more complex design, Lumière required a lot of initial review and planning to determine the best path to success.
Preproduction
Screenshot from original prototype
Screenshot from original prototype
Screenshot from original prototype
Environment concept art for minigame
Environment concept art for minigame
Environment concept art for overworld
Excerpt from prototype assessment
Screenshot of early environment redesign concept
Character and color concept art
We began preproduction with an assessment of the prototype and assets provided by the LIVE Lab and determined what we could use and what needed additional work. Several of the mini-games had only preliminary designs and most of the environments were still simple white boxes. The style and consistency of the UI and environments needed to be addressed, to better match the feel of the game. We established a new style guide and set to work re-building much of the game.
Screenshots from Game
The game was designed in a 2.5D setup with 2D assets in a 3D environment and 3D characters. Not only did this design help us keep things optimized so the game would run in WebGL but it reminded us of an Impressionist painting - viewed too close or from the wrong angle, the scenes didn't make sense but from the right perspective, everything came together. The final game included 8 environments, the player character, 13 main (named) characters and about a dozen variants of the generic NPC, and 3 mini-games. The game was released on time in August 2018.
Branding and Collateral
Excerpt from artwork list
Lumière one-sheet (front)
Lumière one-sheet (back)
Lumière logo and background art
Lumière teaser flyer
Excerpt from Act Guide
Excerpt from Act Guide
In addition to overseeing art and and other creative elements of game production, I was also responsible for establishing the brand and supervising or creating much of the accompanying collateral. The involved the development of the logo, document templates, trailers, marketing, sales and instructional pieces.