Since we have an advantage of a game artist in our team, we should use the opportunity to make our game visually appealing as well. Because I believe that visuals are responsible for the atmosphere and immersion into a game, even if it’s a game for videochat.
For our game we suggest players a template of a haunted mansion house.
This is an upgrated version of the original draft made by Arthur, that we used in our first playtest.
My task was to make it visually appealing and correlating with the whole game concept of a spooky house. That’s why I’ve chosen a dark blue-purple colour scheme with some bright contrasting colours, even though their vibrancy was slightly desaturated to keep the atmosphere. Also most of the rooms have red elements which catch attention. That can potentially play with players’ psychology and make them choose these rooms more often (for both teams) which will cause more clashes and game activity.
As a game artist I must take into account our rules and highlight the most important areas. First of all I clearly labeled all the rooms. Also you can notice that entrance area stands out of the rest of the rooms with lighter colours, even compared to the kitchen, which has similar light tiles. That was done on purpose as the Hunters team starts from that particular area. Same thing concerns Ghosts. In the rules they start from the attic. Though it’s not possible to place the attic, covering the rooms underneath, I decided to make just an entrance to a supposed attic area, where Ghosts will start their game. To underline that it’s clearly a ghost area, I used stereotypical green “ectoplasm”-green colour to encourage player’s familiarity and positive stereotypes. I have also spread some ectoplasm drops over the whole building, but for the entrance, since it’s exclusively the hunters’ territory.
Overal, I’m satisfied with the result along with my teammates. I believe I managed to create a firm visual base of our project and we will adjust the whole presentation to this particular style. It concerns the rule set document layout and colour scheme, which I’ll make while further playtests are taking place and the rules are being polished more and more.