#not realizing the apps problem was it simply ONLY covered beginner material. so it was only gonna be useful for 6 months to 2 years tops.

[rigelmejo]

Really basic study tips. As in, you have no idea where to start, or you've been floundering for X period of time not making progress.

Total beginner?

Go to a search engine site. Whatever one you want Google.com, duckduckgo.com, or a searx.space site will work (I like search.hbubli.cc a lot). I think a non-google search engine will give you less ads and more specific results though so keep that in mind.

As a total beginner, search for some articles and advice to help you start planning HOW you are going to study a language. Search things like "how to learn X" where X is the language, "how i learned X," "guide to learn X." Ignore the product endorsement pages as best you can, you're looking for personal blogs and posts on learner forums like chinese-forums.com and forum.language-learners.org. After reading a few of these, come up with a list of general things you need to learn. This list will generally be: to read, to listen, to write, to speak. The articles/advice you find will likely mention Specific Study Activities people did to learn each of those skills - write them down! You might not do all those study activities yourself. But its good to know what possible study activities will help build each of the 4 skills.

Now get more specific. Think about your long term goals for this language. Be as SPECIFIC as possible. Things like "I want to pass the B2 exam in French" (and knowing what CEFR levels are), or "I want to watch History 3 Trapped in chinese with chinese subtitles" or "I want to read Mo Dao Zu Shi in chinese" or "I want to play Final Fantasy 16 in japanese" or "I want to make friends with spanish speakers and be able to talk about my hobbies in depth, and understand their comments on that subject and be able to ask what they mean if I get confused." Truly be as specific as possible. Ideally make more than one long term goal like this. And then specify EVEN MORE. So you want to "pass the B2 exam in French" - why? What real world application will you use those skills for. A possible answer: to work in a French office job in engineering. Great! Now you know very specifically what to look up for what you Need to actually study: you need to look up business appropriate writing examples, grammar for emails, engineering technical vocabulary, IN addition to everything required on the B2 exam. Your goal is to read mdzs in chinese? Lets get more specific: how many unique words are in mdzs (maybe you want to study ALL of them), how much do you wish to understand? 100% or is just understanding the main idea, or main idea and some details, good enough? Do you want to learn by Doing (reading and looking up things you don't know) or by studying ahead of time first (like studying vocabulary lists). Im getting into the weeds.

My point is: once you have a Very Specific Long Term Goal you can look up how to study to accomplish that very specific goal. If you want to get a B2 certificate there's courses and textbooks and classes and free materials that match 100% the material on the B2 test, so you can prioritize studying those materials. If your goal is to READ novels, you'll likely be looking for "how to read X" advice articles and then studying based on that advice (which is often "learn a few thousand frequent words, study a grammar resource, use graded reader material at your reading level, extensively and intensively read, look up unknown words either constantly or occasionally as desired when reading new material, and continue picking more difficult material with new unknown words"). Whatever your specific goal, you will go to a search engine and look up how people have accomplished THAT specific goal. Those study activities they did will be things you can do that you know worked for someone. If you get lucky, someone might suggest ALL the resources and study activities you need to accomplish your specific goal. Or they will know of a textbook/course/site that provides everything you need so you can just go do it. I'll use a reading goal example because its a specific goal i've had. I'd have the goal "read X book in chinese" so I'd look up "how to read chinese" "how to learn to read chinese novels" "how i read chinese webnovels" and similar search terms. I found suggestions like these on articles I found written by people who managed to learn to read chinese webnovels: Ben Whatley's strategy had been learn 2000 common words on memrise (he made a deck and shared it), read a characters guide (he linked the article he read), use graded readers (he linked Mandarin Companion), use Pleco app and read inside it (he linked Pleco) and in 6 months he was reading novels using Pleco for unknown words. I copied most of what he did, and did some of my own other study activities for theother 3 listening speaking writing skills. And in 6 months I was also reading webnovels in Pleco. Another article was by Readibu app creator, who read webnovels in chinese just looking up TONS of words till they learned (real brute force method). But it worked! They learned. So copying them by using Readibu app ans brute force reading MANY novels would work. Another good article is on HeavenlyPath.notion.site, they have articles on specifically what materials to study to learn to read - their article suggestions are similar to the process I went through in studying and Im confident if you follow their advice you'll be reading chinese in 1 year or less. (I saw one person who was reading webnovels within 3 months of following the Heavenly Path's guide plan). LOOK UP your specific long term goal, and write down specific activities people did to learn how to do that long term goal. Ideally: you will have some

SHORT TERM GOALS: you will not accomplish your long term language goal for 1 year or more. Probably not for many years. So make some short and medium term goals to guide you through studying and keep you on track. These can be any goals you want, that are stepping stones to the specific long term goals you set. So for the "read mdzs in chinese" long term goal, short and medium term goals might be the following: short term: learn 10 common words a week (through SRS like anki or a vocabulary list), study 100 common hanzi this month (using a book reference or SRS or a site), read 1 chapter of a grammar guide a week (a site or textbook or reference book), medium term: read a graded reader with 100 unique words once I have studied 300 words (like Mandarin Companion books or Pleco graded readers for sale), read a 500 unique word graded reader once I have studied 600 words, read 秃秃大王 and look up words I don't know once I have studied 1500 words (read in Pleco or Readibu or using any click-translator tool or translator/dictionary app), read another chinese novel with 1500 unique words, read a 30,000 word chinese 2 hours a day until I finish it, read another 30,000 word novel and see if I can finish it in less time, read a 60,000 word novel, read a 120,000 word novel, read a novel extensively without looking any words up and practice reading skills of relying on context clues (pick a novel with lower unique word count), read a novel a little above your reading level (a 2000 unique word count if say you only know 1700 words), go to a reading difficulty list and pick some novels easier than mdzs to read but harder than novels you've already read (Readibu ranks novels by HSK level, Heavenly Path ranks novel difficulty, if you search online you'll find other reading difficulty lists and sites). Those shorter term goals will give you things to work for this week, this month, this year. An example of study goals and activities might be: study all vocabulary, hanzi, grammar in 1 textbook chapter a week (lets say 20 new words/10-20 new hanzi,1-5 new grammar points - or alternatively you have 3 SRS anki decks for vocab, hanzi, grammar) along with read and look up unknown key words for 30 minutes a day (at first you may read graded readers then move onto novels). Those are short term goals you can ensure you meet weekly, and they also contribute to being able to read better gradually each month until you hit long term goals.

If you are very bad at making your own schedule and study plans: look for a good premade study material and just follow it. A good study material will: teach reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, all the way to intermediate level. You may need to find multiple premade resources, such as 1 resource for writing/reading (many textbooks that teach 2000+ words and basic grammar will suffice) and 1 for speaking/listening (perhaps a good podcast, glossika, a tutor). Ideally formal classes will teach all 4 skills to intermediate level if you take 4 semesters of classes as an adult (beginner 1, beginner 2, intermediate 1, intermediate 2). Especially if the classes teach in accordance with trying to match you to expected defined language level skills (so formal classes that have syllabus goals that align with HSK, CEFR, or national standards of X level of fluency). So formal classes are an option. The same tips as above apply: make short term goals do do X a week, like study 30 minutes to 2 hours a day, to learn 10 new words a week, to get through X chapters a month, to practice speaking/reading/writing/reading oriented activities to some degree.

My short advice for picking a premade resource if totally lost: pick a starting material that covers 2000 words, basic grammar, and has dialogues if you don't know where to start. That will be enough to cover roughly beginner level language skills. I suggest you study by: studying the vocabulary and grammar of each chapter, listen to the dialogue with and without translation repeatedly until you understand it (listening skills), read the dialogue with and without translation (reading skills), write out example sentences using the new vocabulary and grammar (writing skills, the textbook exercises usually ask you to do this), speak your example sentences out loud (speaking practice), record yourself saying the dialogue and compare it to the dialogue audio - repeat this exercise until you sound similar in pronunciation to dialogue (speaking exercise - shadowing). Most decent textbooks will allow you to come up with similar activities to those listed above, to study some writing reading speaking listening. I like the Teach Yourself books as an example of the most basic version of what you need. Many languages have much better specific textbooks of that language. But if you're totally lost, get a Teach Yourself book and audio free from a library or for 10 dollars (or ANY equivalent book that teaches at least 2000 words and grammar) and go through it. If you buy a language specific textbook: keep working through the series until you've learned 2000 words and covered all basic grammar. For example Genk 1 and 2 cover 1700 words so you would want to work all the way through Genki 2 and ger near 2000 words before branching off to a textbook for intermediate students, or into native speaker materials. (Another example is I found a chinese textbook once that only taught 200 words... as a beginner you would not find that book as useful as one with more vocabulary)

Another adequate premade resource option: if you lile SRS tools like anki, look up premade decks that teach what you need to learn as a beginner. For Japanese you might look up "common words japanese anki deck" (Japanese core deck with 2k or more words is likely an option you'll see), "japanese grammar anki deck" (Tae Kin grammar deck is an option that covers common grammar), "JLPT kanji deck" or "kanji anki deck" or "kanji with mnemonics anki deck" (to study kanji). Ideally you study vocabulary, vocabulary, kanji, and ideally some of these anki decks will have audio and sentence examples for reading practice. Like with a textbook, you would attempt to do exercises which cover reading writing speaking listening. For reading and writing you may read sentences on anki cards, and write or type example sentences in a journal with new words you study and new grammar points. For listening you will play the sentence audio of a card with eyes closed until you hear the words clearly and recognize them, and for speaking you'll speak out the sentences and compare what you say to the audio on the card.

Keep in mind your specific long term goals! If your goal is speak to friend about hobby, you may follow a textbook and still need to ALSO make yourself practice talking weekly (on a language exchange app, with a tutor, with yourself, shadowing dialogues, looking up specific words you wish to discuss). If your goal is to read novels, you will likely need to seek out graded readers OUTSIDE your textbook and practice reading gradually harder material weekly. If your goal is listening to audio dramas, you will want an outside podcast resource likely starting with a Learner Podcast (chinese101, slow chinese, comprehensible chinese youtube channel) then move into graded reader audiobooks, then listen to audio dramas with transcripts, then just listen and look words up.

Once you hit lower intermediate: I'm defining that here as roughly you have studied 2000+ words, are familiar with basic grammar and comfortable looking up more specialized grammar information, and if you used a premade material then you have finished the beginner level material. If you desire to stay on a premade route then pick new resources made for intermediate learners. Do not dwell in the beginner material forever once you've studied it, continue to challenge yourself and learn new things regularly. (No matter what, continue to learn new things regularly, if you do that then every few hundred hours of study you WILL make significant progress toward your goals). Once you have hit intermediate it is also time to start adding activities that work toward your Very Specific Long Term goals now if you didn't already start. If you want to watch shows one day, this is when you start TRYING and get an idea of how much you understand versus how much you need to learn and WHAT you need to learn to do your goal well. If you want to read novels then start graded readers NOW if you havent already and progress to more difficult reading eventually into reading novels for native speakers. If you want to talk to people, start chatting regularly. If you want to take a B2 test, start studying language test specific study materials, practice doing the tasks you must be able to do to pass the test (so you can see what you need to learn and gauge progress over time), take practice tests. Intermediate level is when SOME stuff for native speakers will be at least understandable enough you can follow the main idea. Or at least, if you look up some key words you'll be able to grasp the main idea. Start engaging with stuff in the language now. For several reasons. 1. You need to practice Understanding all the basics you studied. Just because you studied it doesnt mean you can understand it immediately yet, you have to practice being in situations that require you to understand what you studied. 2. You also need to gauge where you are versus where you want to be, in order to set new short term goals. Once you do things in the language, you will see what specifically you need to study more. 3. By doing the activity you wish to do, you will get better at doing it. This is also a good time to mention that: if you wish to get better at speaking or writing now is the time to practice more. Just like listening and reading, you'll have to Do it more to improve.

The leap from using materials for beginners to materials for intermediate learners is harsh. It just is. The first 3 to 6 months you may feel drained, like you didn't learn much after all, annoyed its so much harder than the beginner material catered usually specifically to a learner's language level. Push through. I suggest goals like "listen to french 30 minutes a day" or "read 1 japanese news article a day" or "chat with someone for 1 hour total a week" or "watch 20 minutes of a show a day" or "write 1 page a day" and look up words you dont know but need to understand something or communicate to someone. Do X for X time period or X length of a chapter/episode type goals may be easiest to stick to during this period. Gradually, the time spent doing activities will add up and it will suddenly feel EASIER. Usually around the time you start understanding quicker and recalling quicker what you studied as a beginner. Then it keeps improving, as you gradually learn more and more. At first, picking the easiest content for your study activity will make the transition to intermediate stuff slightly less drastic. Easier content includes: conversations on daily life that only gradually add more specific topics (so you can lean on the beginner daily life function vocabulary), podcasts for learners entirely in target language and podcasts with transcripts, novels with low unique word counts (ideally 2000 unique words or less until your vocabulary gets bigger), shows you've watched before in a language you know (so you can guess more unknown words and follow the plot even when you don't understand the target language words), video game lets plays (ideally with captions) of video games you've played before, playing video games you already have played before and know the story for, reading summaries before starting new shows or books so you know what the general story is, reading books that have translations to a language you know (so you can read the translation then original or vice versa for additional context). Using any tools available (dictionary apps, translation apps like Pleco and Google Translate and click-translate web browser tools, Edge Read Aloud tool, reader apps like Kindle and Readibu, apps like Netflix dual subitles stuff).

Last mention: check in with your goals every so often. You might check in every 3 months, and say you notice you never manage to study daily (if that was your short term goal). That could be a sign it might be better to change your study schedule to study a couple hours on the days your life schedule is less busy, and skip study on busy days. Or it may be a sign the study activity you're trying to do daily is Very Hard for you to stick to, and maybe you should switch to a different study activity. (Example would be: I can't do SRS flashcards consistently, so when I got tired of SRS anki after a few months as a beginner, I switched to reading graded readers daily to learn new vocabulary then reading novels and looking up words. Another example: I love Listening Reading Method but could never do it as it was designed, so after a month of only doing 15 hours of it instead of the 100 hours the method intended at minimum in that time, I decided to modify that study activity into something I could get myself to do daily and enjoy more).

And, of course, its okay if what works for one person doesn't work for you. Everyone's different. As long as you are regularly studying some new things, and practicing understanding things you've studied before, you will make progress as the study hours add up. It may take hundreds of hours to see significant progress, but you Will see some progress every few hundreds of hours of study. I made the quick start suggestions for beginners above, because I have seen some people (including me) get lost at the start with no idea what a good resource looks like and no idea what to study, or how to determine goals and progress on those goals.

[cellerityweb]

Shadow Tactics – Finding the Perfect Art Style

From colorful to rather dark and realistic: finding the right art style for Shadow Tactics took time, but it was worth every second.

Since the company’s founding in 2012 we developed two big games for PC and consoles as well as several mobile apps, with these two games being »The Last Tinker« and our recent release »Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun«. In this article we want to take you behind the scenes of our quest to find a fitting art style for both The Last Tinker and Shadow Tactics. First off, we will introduce both titles and their art styles to you. After that we’ll dive right into the development process before we talk about problems and challenges we encountered along the journey – and of course about how we solved these issues.

The Art Style of The Last Tinker & Shadow Tactics

The Last Tinker is a third person jump ‘n’ run in a colorful world, inspired by games like »Banjoo Kazooie« and »Jak & Dexter«. As Koru, you must defeat the Bleakness that threatens Colortown by using the power of colors. The game’s style is defined by round and smooth shapes, bright colors and a warm light setting. Everything is made from paper, color and glue which combined results in papier-mâché. As a contrast, we added some cardboard elements to create edges and make the world look more interesting. No straight lines, no 90 degrees, rather playful than super accurately drawn patterns – everything looks like it’s made and painted by children. The game’s characters are cartoony and funny, showing their attributes in their looks.

Shadow Tactics is set in Japan’s Edo period and it’s quite the opposite of The Last Tinker. It’s a hardcore realtime stealth game in which you control five different characters with individual skillsets. Basically, it‘s »Commandos« with Ninjas. You kill or sneak around enemies to accomplish your missions. Theme and story of this game are darker and grittier, that‘s why we decided to create a more realistic style and combine it with non-realistic elements like outlines imitating ink, that typical Japanese paintings are famous for. We included many details and each map has its own interesting light setup to catch the mood of a level. In comparison to The Last Tinker, we used more desaturated colors. All characters are human but they all have their own unique silhouette, so you can instantly identify and recognize them. However, they have longer legs than normal humans – a design decision we made because the perspective made them look smaller and somehow compressed.

Finding the Style for The Last Tinker

The Last Tinker started as a project while we were still at university and we had three to four weeks to complete it. It had to be in 3D which was a problem for us at that time. When we started developing the style, our artists had nearly no experience in 3D modeling – our strength clearly lied in creating 2D graphics. So we thought about how we could use our skills in creating 2D graphics for a 3D game. We didn’t have the time and experience to make high detailed models so we thought about what we could create with the help of simple shapes and if we could create details with the help of textures. That‘s why we started with a 2D image that we projected on a plane and roughly cut out the shape of the image. Then we extruded the face and voila – we had a 3D model. Now we just needed the right material to realize this style, ending up with cardboard. [6]

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So we decided to create a world made entirely out of cardboard but we weren’t really satisfied with the early outcome. It looked sort of boring. Plus, we felt like cheaters because our 3D models were so simple. Still, we needed 3D models with plain shapes that could quickly be created and animated. Then we had the perfect idea: Papier-mâché! It’s perfect for beginners in 3D modeling. Plus, at university we were five artists. After starting the real production, we were two artists, then four. By only having to handle one or two materials we were able to create a world fully made of papier-mâché. Material handling was crucial, as creating different good looking materials that look good and real costs a lot of time.

Everybody loved the idea and since we had proper 2D skills, we decided to use textures to add detailed hand-painted patterns.

Now we had a base to work with. To get to know the material better we came together with artists and game designers in tinkering sessions [1], testing different shapes and patterns. We had two or three of these meetings and in the end we really knew the material and its potential. The figures we made were nice references. Some were really good, some were pretty ugly. Oh, and we still have them in our office. One of them sits right next to me and watches me … creep … [2]

Anyway, after having decided on a direction, we wanted to get a clearer vision for our design, which we eventually found in the works of Hundertwasser and Niki de Saint Phalle. Both focus on round and smooth shapes which colorful textures. Plus, we looked for papier-mâché figures made by kids because we wanted the world to look like kids built it. Those references gave us a good feeling for how the world and characters should look like.

First Steps in the Right Direction

After graduation, we occasionally experimented with the prototype, got a lot of feedback and wondered how we could improve it. When it became official that we could make The Last Tinker a complete game, we developed a story and reworked the gameplay which both influenced the style of the game. The first thing we noticed was that everything looked too clean and not very lifelike.

So we added some color splashes and dirt to make everything look a bit more used. Along with the story came Colortown’s different districts, which served the gameplay well. Prior to that, the world was so colorful and chaotic that players often got lost. Introducing the districts and with them some coloring rules helped solving this issue. As already mentioned, we initially used only two materials. After starting the development, however, we considered adding more materials like water and paper hills [3] to make the world more interesting. We struggled a long time with the water because it never really fit into the world.

Then we had the idea to add patterns that you can see on nearly every asset: spirals. They appear as ripples in the water and as splashes in waterfalls. Honestly, I love spirals and I loved drawing them. After some time though, I was so fed up with them that now, every time I see a spiral, I’m about to scream!

Of course, not all of Tinkerworld is friendly and colorful. The Bleakness wants to erase everything in it. The player sets out on an adventure to defeat the Bleakness and the monsters it created – so much for our vision of the first prototype. Style-wise, they needed to fit into the world, so we gave them round and simple shapes. Still, we wanted them to look like something totally strange and foreign to the world. So we decided to make them out of some kind of goo, however, they seemed like being made out of porcelaine. Again – with the story we added in the later production, in which whole colortwon is covered by bleakness – we needed to find a design for this new material. We had an overall feeling and look for the creatures but we still struggled with the Bleakness that wasn‘t lifelike.

We had so many concepts [4] and it took us very long to get the Bleakness’ style right – also because of some technical problems. We ended up with a mix between a less shiny form of goo, and something that you can‘t touch, something that isn‘t really quite there. We also added some patterns on every bleak object to give them a little bit of a mystical appearance. [5]

Finding the Style for Shadow Tactics

The basic idea for Shadow Tactics formed during our time at university. Our Creative Director had always been a huge fan of “Commandos”, so he thought “Why not revive this genre?” So, what’s cool and fits a stealth game? Exactly: ninjas! So we pitched a Commandos-like game with ninjas, with the very first draft being a mobile version. And as we all know, it‘s always common to reuse skills you acquired in prior projects to do something completely different … not. Shadow Tactics was supposed to become a mobile game [7] , so we had a rather cute and cartoony style in mind, which we were already used to. Or in other words: we were – artistically speaking – kind of stuck and pretty much too influenced by our work on The Last Tinker, but we knew that this wasn’t the style we wanted to go for. We wanted to reach these old fans of Commandos which were used to a much more realistic style with tons of details and crispy textures.

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We analyzed the spiritual predecessor [8] and tried to understand what made Commandos … well, Commandos. We wanted to keep its core elements within in our own style to keep the old fans of the game happy – for us artists, however, finding the right style became a real struggle. We had our concept artist overpaint some Commandos screenshots [9] [10] to get a better feeling for a more realistic style while trying to add our touch to it. We never wanted to create some super realistic style, because that just wouldn’t have been us. Plus, for only four artists it was nearly impossible to make a realistically looking game, so we mixed realistic elements with non-realistic elements. We started to concept and model some buildings because somehow the concepts we had created so far didn‘t get us any further. In the beginning, we reduced the complexity of the models and again used textures to obtain detail, which based on photographs that our artists painted over to give them a painted look. We experimented with different non-realistic elements like outlines and canvas patterns [11]. The outlines worked best ingame and fit the Asian style the most, while the canvas patterns created too much noise and simply didn‘t look good. After finishing the first playable prototype [12] [13] , we already knew that we also wanted to include numerous interesting light-settings for catching different moods.

Shadow Tactics’ pre-alpha

For our vertical slice we created polished assets to get a feeling for the style and the quality we wanted to reach, so a lot of time went into one level [14]. Between putting up the prototype and this pre-alpha version we had time to get used to the perspective that brought its own challenges with it. We changed the color palette and various little details, because the prototype seemed a bit to cheerful and idyllic. Shadow Tactics’ story included wars and tragedies, so we developed a better fitting style, using more desaturated colors, but still keeping it very painty, though with reduced details and thick outlines.

From there on out we received some feedback from friends from other games companies, many of them asking „Oh, is it a mobile game?“ Just what you want to hear when you’re developing a big PC and console game … it really bothered us. We realized that our current version was too far away from the original Commandos style, lacking detail, crispiness and realism. We used no normal or specular maps which therefore had no depth and small surface details – everything was kind of plane. This particular level admittedly wasn‘t the best choice for a vertical slice, because it was one of our most colorful ones – not the best basis for finding the right art style for a game that’s getting darker and darker in the long run.

From Pre-Alpha to Alpha

When we created our alpha version [15], we added some normal as well as some specular maps for metallic assets, also adding further details to textures like on stones and thatches. We changed the way that nature looked, from a very painty to a more realistic style, with small leaves instead of big spots. We also removed the outlines from all foliage. Additionally we used the new lighting system from Unity 5. However, we first wanted to get the overall setup right, so we lost the interesting lighting at that stage. And still, it wasn’t what we were aiming for …

From Pre-Alpha to Pre-Beta

In our pre-beta version [16] we decreased the overall number of outlines and made them thinner. We even considered deleting them completely but lost that thought because they created a nice depth and contrast between asset and terrain. We also added dirt to the textures to give everything a gritty and used look. And our shaders learned color variations which you can see on the stones. At that time we didn‘t have a good setup, that‘s why it looks a bit out of place. Besides making the scenes more realistic, however, it kind of masked the fact that we used the same assets over and over again. We tweaked a lot of small things in this phase of development and improved our terrain by adding normal and height maps. These height maps did a better job in blending textures, so the transition between two materials like grass and dirt looked rather crispy than blurry. Eventually, we gave every level a nice light-setup and used color mapping to create more variety between the levels thus creating the proper mood. Ambient particles like in The Last Tinker made the world more lifelike. Well, so much for finding and creating the right art style for Shadow Tactics.

Problems and Solutions

On our quest to find the right art style for both The Last Tinker and Shadow Tactics we certainly had to overcome quite a number of challenges. So, let’s take a look at what these problems were and how we managed to solve them.

The Last Tinker

As mentioned earlier, the first version of The Last Tinker was too colorful and chaotic. Players got lost on a regular basis and didn’t know where to go. Since we used every color to paint the assets and usually had a bright light-setup, we couldn’t use color or light to guide the player through the world. As we developed the story we divided Colortown into different districts. That helped us bringing some order into this colorful world. Bye reducing the number of colors per district and, at the same time, adding specific shapes and patterns as well as some coloring rules, we were able to help players navigate better. Plus, every district is inhabited by different races [17][18][19]. The whole game uses the same house assets. So by giving each districts its own attributes and uniquely designed assets, we could create enough variety and saved a lot of time by not modeling different house types.

Another way to facilitate navigation was adding unique landmarks like a big windmill [20] or unique fountains or maybe special buildings like taverns, that draw the players’ attention and thereby help them remember certain places. Unfortunately, we never managed to completely solve this issue so eventually we gave our companion Tap a guiding feature. Whenever you call him, he shows you the way before you get lost again. Anyway, we just yellow to mainly mark relevant gameplay assets climbable walls, pillars you can jump on or specific landmarks. So, whenever you see something yellow, that’s where you want to go!

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The Challenges of Creating Shadow Tactics

21 – time was scarce … so was a good night’s sleep.

Shadow Tactics confronted us with a whole set of different problems, the biggest being the style itself. On the one hand we weren’t sure on which platform we’d release the game. On the other hand our artists were still too influenced by our previous projects that were all cute and cartoony. »Realism« was another big thing. Not only did we want to make a more realistic looking game, we also wanted it to be historically correct. For that we had to do a lot of research and research takes up a lot of your time! Time – unsurprisingly – was a big problem, but well … when isn’t time a problem game development [21] ? As mentioned in the beginning we switched between styles a couple of times, until we were told it looked like a mobile game and we started to increase the quality, added normal and spec maps, better lighting and more details overall, which resulted in a ton of additional work. And with us still being only four artists, time was crucial. Also, we lacked experience in many ways, e.g. when it came creating high-detailed terrains and proper lighting setup, so we had to get to know a lot of new tools which – again – cost us a lot of time we didn‘t have. Oh, did I mention the time problem? Well, luckily we have a lot of comfortable couches in our office.

When we had finally developed the first style-prototypes and started with the creation of assets, we encountered a new problem.

The Perspective

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In the beginning we had really large curved roofs that took up a lot of screen space which made it difficult for our level designers to place enemies the way they wanted. It also made it difficult to navigate the player characters because you couldn‘t see what was behind the buildings. It was possible to rotate the camera but with all these roofs the player wouldn’t have been doing much else, which would have eventually killed the fun. Also, the big roofs looked kind of out of place, so we iterated them a couple of times until they fit. We minimized the roof sizes and flattened [23] them so they wouldn‘t hide the enemies on the ground.

The Architecture

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(56.) Another problem was the Asian architecture. We wanted our characters to be able to climb roofs to generate that sneaky ninja feeling. But Asian roofs are rather bent and curved and these shapes collided with our animations. The feet of the characters didn‘t adapt to the ground beneath them, so it always seemed like they were floating. Also, you could never tell where you were supposed to go because the shapes were too undefined – you never quite knew where you could climb up and where you couldn’t.

So we designed three types of roofs [24]: – flat and completely walkable rooftops – rooftops with obstacles protecting you from your enemies’ eyes – inaccessible rooftops – Sadly, we lost a little bit of the Asian feel and typical design but in this case proper gameplay was more important.

  Readability

The third challenge was readability. Being able to instantly recognize enemies and usable objects is a must. In the beginning we struggled with this topic because we didn’t have enough contrast between the different assets. For example, every wood asset mostly had the same color. There was no real eye candy drawing the player’s attention. Enemies kind of disappeared within the environment because they were designed in the same color scheme like everything else. To solve this issue, we created some landmarks, made the shadows darker to create depth and added different color shades to give the assets more contrast [22].

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Then we developed a slightly different, more saturated and brighter color scheme for enemies. We also provided them with fake lighting so the environmental lighting wouldn‘t affect them as much as the assets surrounding them. The fake light was a gradient that made enemies look brighter from above while usually, they would look brighter on the bottom, to separate them from the ground. In this case, however, they are wearing dark trousers, so it wouldn‘t have had any visual effect. Thanks to the lighting, they wouldn‘t completely merge with the environment and were therefore a lot easier to spot.

Summary

Every game needs its own process of creating a style. You will encounter different problems and will have to find individual solutions for all of them, no matter if your following project is similar to the first. Problems might occur because many reasons, a new setting maybe. I think, what‘s always important when creating a style, is that you use the skills your artists have. Don’t try to create something you can‘t identify with or that doesn‘t fit your skills just because it would be so much cooler. When you don‘t create something that you can absolutely relate to, you will get stuck and be very unhappy with the result. That said, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t leave your comfort zone. We definitely left ours in order to make Shadow Tactics.

After The Last Tinker and some other cute looking games we wanted to develop something different and in the early beginnings we struggled a lot – the style simply wasn’t like anything we were used to. After some long discussions, reworks and iterations, however, it turned out quite well. The Last Tinker and Shadow Tactics are two completely different games with completely individual styles. Sure, we could have gone for a super realistic style, but it wouldn’t have made us happy. And if that had been the case, maybe we wouldn’t have put that much heart and effort into it to make it look great.

About the Author:

Bianca Dörr

is Art Director and Texture Artist at Mimimi Productions.

In her position as Art Director, Bianca is with Mimimi Productions since 2012. She’s not only in charge of leading and coordinating the art team, but also works on game asset textures and develops the art styles for every major project. On top she is responsible for the quality of all graphics and artworks. @Katzenviechle

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