If we got a dollar for every time someone has asked us about using color, we could have bought Twitter ourselves. As much as we love color and have worked with it for many years throughout our careers, we might have an even bigger obsession with black & white. Jokes aside, the Black & White spectrum has been a very interesting exploration for Jack and myself, as it creates a completely different feeling and understanding of the world, object and characters. In a way it’s akin to observing the everyday world as a different creature altogether.
When Jack wrote and illustrated in the book “Captain & Crow’s ABCs” the characters Pirate & Crow were drawn as B&W and when the book was finished it had a very graphic design. We quickly realized that, while it worked for a book, Pirate had a really hard time standing out in an interactive format, especially as one of the pirates in video games. At first we were puzzled, but as we started to discover the gray gradations, line shading and baked in lighting, we started to fall in love with the look of our world and realized it has an incredible amount of potential!
One of the most interesting things that we’ve discovered about our B&W look is that it lets us mix daytime and nighttime elements together in a variety of ways. It lets us discover exciting new possibilities, which in color would have been a constant problem. It allows us to create worlds that feel unique, different and different from all other games out there. On top of that every item in this B&W spectrum takes on a tactile and iconic feel, which is an important element of capturing value in a digital item. We realized that to truly make this a top rated mobile pirate game that sticks out from the rest, we needed to redefine Black and White.
Another element of color that we welcomed was the invisible limitation of graphical overload and the amount of FX we can have on screen. Many games, including AAA titles for consoles just go crazy with the amount of “stuff” that’s on screen, and in the most tense moments the screen can easily overload the user with too much unnecessary information causing momentary confusion.
We saw that once we have achieved that super fine balance, it didn’t disrupt the experience or confuse the player with too much on-screen information. The players were able to tell elements apart, and remain in visual control, especially as these visuals are displayed on a mobile device. As we added more and more hand-drawn FX, we drew the line and ended up using other solutions to add “more” without graphical overload. The k.i.s.s. philosophy has worked wonders for the Iphone, Tesla and other great products, so why not a mobile pirate ship game.
Give Pirate’s Boom Boom a try and let us know what you think about our game in Black & White. Does our unique look puts us as one of the more interesting looking mobile pirate games.
Next Time – Electronic Music in a Pirate Game?Yes!!!
