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While making a video game, creating animation or game art assets, developers and artists come up with ambitious, interesting ideas. Some of them can potentially be great, while others, though they look perfectly fine at first glance, won’t really work well in a long-term perspective. Before focusing on the idea, you have to refine it and make sure it will be worth the effort. How can you find out what will work?
Concept art allows us to convey ideas before putting them into full production. The purpose of concept art is to show a glimpse of the idea that you have to people and see whether they like it or not. Think of it as a blueprint of a potentially gorgeous-looking building that is yet to be built.
Let’s talk about concept art studios, what they do and how they help your project in the pre-production stage of game development.
Concept art studios play a crucial role in the pre-production stage of projects by putting developers’ ideas and stories into visual representations – sometimes very roughly – that help guide the development process further. From a long-term perspective, concept artists help you create the visual design and aesthetic foundations that will later be expanded during the production and post-production stages.
While working on the game or animation, you may want to plan ahead some scenes that are complex and significant for a story: a powerful, hooking beginning or a great, epic final battle. It’s difficult to convey important things like that quickly and briefly — a certain prototype is required. This is where concept art studios come to help: they will allow you to see if everything planned is working, can be glued together and is interesting and entertaining enough.
Studios tend to follow a common production pipeline. Let’s take a closer look at it.
The work starts with an internal discussion about things that don’t exist yet but will come to life in later stages of development. At this stage, it’s important to understand the themes of the upcoming game, its aesthetics, its world-building and its overall vibe.
Beautiful words will soon become beautiful images, so it’s important to see if everyone understands the meaning of these words. While concept art is all about imagination and creativity, some limits can exist, especially if the game’s art technique is not as flexible as stylized or cartoon styles and more grounded, like realistic style.
At this stage, artists work on sketching and establishing ideas, sometimes with various options available for further review and discussion. As stated before, brainstorming is more than welcome at this point, so artists usually create something truly distinct and then shape it into something that will work in the context of the game and chosen art style.
New, additional meetings are held to discuss ideas with producers, designers and developers and see various options and further paths that can be taken. Engineers check the concept art for its implementation possibilities on a technical level, feedback is taken into consideration, some edits can be made in terms of additional sketching, colorways, shapes, lightning, details and so on.
After concept art is approved and finalized, the actual production of a level design or a character starts. Several concept arts may affect the final result, with all the best aspects being transported into the final result to make the delivered product as good as possible.
Let’s start by taking a look at several services a concept art studio can provide you with.
Concept art outsourcing studios can also create sketches of event sequences for your animation or game’s cutscene. They bear in mind the cinematic aspect of it, allowing you to see if the narrative structure that has been planned works as intended.
Here you can see some rough sketches of storyboards RocketBrush Studio made for TreasureLand during the pre-production phase of working on a cinematic trailer.
The previous step resulted in a simplistic storyboard, which gave us a general idea for the video. We analyzed each frame and reworked them into complete and detailed concepts, which allowed us to create a simple animatic for further work on the project.
Concept artists design characters’ looks: their outfits, facial expressions, poses and unique traits. These designs serve as a blueprint for animators, modelers and other team members in later stages of development.
Here is the concept art of the character design we made for TreasureLand.
What looks like a simple collection of concept art later turned out to be a foundation for a detailed character design:
Concept art studios can help you develop the look and feel of a project by designing environments, characters, creatures, props, vehicles and other visual elements in a preliminary stage. After the review, you can see what will be great for your project and what can be omitted. These designs, if approved, will help artists to set up the general feel and atmosphere of the project.
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Concept art studio artists also design immersive and detailed settings where the story takes place: landscapes, interiors, cities, rooms, caves and so on. It will help you establish the scale and scope of worldbuilding and highlight the important aspects that should be enhanced later on.
Concept art studios also help really well to create remarkable promotional art. Promos in general can be very crucial for your game’s success, so it’s natural to make art that will be striking and eye-catching.
This type of art can be used for pitching ambitious ideas or can safely go through several iterations to ensure the final version will look great and sell your product effectively. That’s why creating basic, preliminary versions to guide artists and marketers forward is common. Conceptualizing several versions and investigating which one works best is regularly done by companies.
Outsourcing is a very popular way for developers to focus more on other aspects of game-making and entrust a significant part of their work to a team of professionals. In addition, concept art studios already have all the tools and software required, so you don’t have to worry about it. Their workflow is also tested out and regulated within, allowing them to deliver satisfying final products. Outsourcing is common in the entertainment industry and can be a great, cost-efficient way to create things.
Outsourcing sketching and concept art is not really different from other art outsourcing projects. Artists will learn more about the game’s aspects and then start working on concept art. While they do that, the developer can put their team’s effort into core aspects of the game, such as level design, story, gameplay mechanics and other stuff.
If you need any help with concept art or any other game development services, from character design and animation to full-scale game development, you can work with RocketBrush Studio to get things done.
We have been working since 2016 and worked together with leading game developers, such as Applovin, Paradox Interactive, Supercell, Romero Games and others. You can read our testimonials here.
Our expertise spans from stylized casual mobile puzzle illustrations to challenging pixelated 2D roguelites made from scratch, from match-3 cozy game art to zombie survival prototyping. You can look at our portfolio here.
Concept art studios are responsible for laying the foundation for great things to come. They help to establish the upcoming game’s visual identity, test out how potentially exciting stuff will look and see if it’s worth pursuing its final form. In some cases, working on concept art even leads to unexpected places, allowing developers to come up with something totally new and fun. All in all, concept art is crucial for the proper game-making process.
The creative input of artists during pre-production will define many things in the future. Make sure that the foundation, the concept of your project, is firmly established!
