At the start of this project I started off by looking at other 16/64-bit games so I could get an idea of other games and their visual styles. Originally we had decided to go with a Cyber-Punk theme, I found researching this genre really easy as I chose this last project, all I really looked at was Blade Runner which is an amazing film to use for researching the Cyber-Punk, in my research I also included Deus Ex, and some art from Art station. These are my research photos.
However after researching and testing out the styles in Unreal we decided to scrap the Cyber-Punk architecture style and chose a 1980-90’s urban New York city skyline, while researching and designing the world I discovered that I could still use some of the Cyber-Punk features like the neon lighted billboards so all was not lost when we changed our genre. While learning how to design various pixel art style buildings I searched google looking for examples to use for research and influence when drawing the environment. These are the pictures that I used to help me with my environment design.
These few images really helped me as they contained different art styles and amount of pixels, with some being 8/16 or even 32 bit graphics. This allowed me to find differences and compare the different styles. For the last set of research I wanted to look at adding a form of outlines to my work but I was unsure so I found two images that perfectly showed the difference between each style.
The first image has quite a clean style while only adding outlines to interactive objects, while this is a nice visual style, I personally preferred the second image as I find outlines on every item adds a nice distinct style that allows you to tell certain items apart from the background if they are the same the colour. I had chosen style with the black outlines around everything when I started to design the World.
Lewis Taylor 