Aesthetics
Today I’ll be elaborating on the visuals of “Flight of the Icarus”, since it is easy to forget that other people are not able to look into the head of the designer where they have saved detailed images of their game.
Flight of the Icarus’ aesthetics are supposed to reflect the mind of the child who stands in its center, Ike. Despite being confronted with a horrific reality in which their entire hometown is wiped out and blasted into the sky, for them this is the opportunity for a great adventure. The colors of the game will therefore invite players to tap into this mindset and treat the game as such. It will be dominated by pastels that correspond to the natural color palette of a small town in Idaho: yellow grain, red farm houses, the orange of a setting sun, the lush green of a lonely apple tree. All in all, in most of the levels these warm colors will take center stage in order to create a positive outlook on the situation. Exceptions are the jail and the forest, which will be filled with dark greens, grays and blues.
However, the entire world will be touched by the yellow light of the sun, which will be the main color of the game all around. Referencing the color wheel, purple, the natural opposite of yellow, will also play a major role in the game, mainly in order to attract the attention of the player to collectables, key items and the correct path to take. This is explained story-wise by the antigravity material that has caused the disaster in the first place, whose color is purple. Not only do players need to collect this material in order to be able to fly, it is also smeared on floating objects within the levels and walls of corridors that lead Ike toward townspeople in need among other things. The contrast that purple creates in such a warmly colored world is used to maximize this attention-grabbing effect.
The aesthetic choices regarding objects and inhabitants of the world, it can be said that most of them are as mundane as it gets. Powerups for Ike and their friend are mere childrens toys, the environments of the game are everyday places one can find in almost any city and the townsfolk are salarymen and women who simply got caught up in business that they don’t intended to be a part of. They are made interesting by the combination of the otherworldly idea of antigravity matter that turns a general store into a maze of floating shelves and a forest of flying cans of baked beans. Players can thus immerse themselves in a fantastic adventure while still relating to the familiarity of the environments.
Turning to the graphical style, the vision for Flight of the Icarus was heavily inspired by a number of indie games that use similar pastel based color schemes and employ a mid to low poly approach to modeling and soft or fuzzy texturing. It must be noted here that this game doesn’t employ extreme low poly counts such as games like the character models of Super Hot or the environments in grow up, while the latter can still be counted toward the visual inspirations for Flight of the Icarus, since low poly games still come closest to a visual comparison to what is planned for this game. Other aesthetic inspirations are Bastion, What The Golf, Untitled Goose Game, Virginia and Life Is Strange. However the game that comes closest to the envisioned aesthetic for Flight of the Icarus is most definitely The Gardens Between. While often employing a completely different color palette to what will be used in this game, The Gardens Between’s character and world design hits the nail on the head. Especially the way how mundane everyday objects are used here to create a fantastical mood by blowing them out of proportion and setting them in such an unusual place is very close to what is planned to be achieved with Flight of the Icarus as it evokes the same child-like wonder.
I hope that this gives the reader a better idea of how this game will look and feel and what kinds of emotions it will likely bring out in players. Im looking forward to writing the next chapter of this diary next Monday!