We are several persons working on a game project, but we are all beginners with Blender and more generally with 3D in general. We just started creating characters, and when we compared our works: the styles weren’t fitting well together.
Since we want to prevent these problems, we thought about writing some guidelines to keep some constancy in the game graphical style, but we don’t know where start from.
I don’t know if it’s the right place to ask questions about this topic, but I found answers nowhere else…
I am maybe not using the right keywords?
So, here are my questions:
Are guidelines necessary/used in most of the game projects?
What is good to define and not to? It’s ok for me to define the colors to use, but when it comes modeling, should we specify the maximum number of polygons, the shapes to avoid, etc…?
If you have any good documentation/website/video to refer to, I would really love to read it.
(Sorry for the mistakes I probably made, I am not a native english speaker)
I guess the best would be to have someone to draw some modelsheet of all the characters, or you can take all the characters that you’ve done and try to make them fit together in a paint application like krita or photoshop.
a color palette can be good too, written guidelines then can be added, like technical guidelines (polygon count) or shapes to avoid.
I think you should try to communicate visually first then add text when needed.
In my mind there would be several things to work out here. It sounds like you might be part of a group of friends that have a similar desire to get right into game development, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but something that might derail you before you get too far. Enthusiasm is great, but you might want to take a step back and figure a few things out first before getting too far into it.
First, I would have a serious discussion about who is responsible for what, ie. who will be the technical lead, art lead, etc. Second, I would make sure to start a GDD (Game Design Document) and lay out just how you (and or the group) would like to see this thing work.
This is a decent start, but like AlmTalp said, finding someone with a little experience would help. That being said, it’s not impossible… you just have to get organized without taking all the fun out of it!
“Management” as a job may be considered a dirty word, but the role is necessary when there are multiple people trying to produce a unified product. While it may feel good to let everyone go their own way and think there will only be minor conflicts which can be sorted out at the end, that almost always ends in failure.
It’s not fun, and gets a lot of flak, but someone needs to do the dirty work: the capability and authority to make decisions (even if that’s getting a consensus from the others) and enforcing them throughout the project while still letting them “do their thing”.