Battle Bands is a cooperative deck builder that takes place in a rock and roll fantasy world. Players assume the role of the guitarist, bassist, drummer, or keyboardist and play with a deck specially tailored for their instrument. Players must work together to defeat outlandish AI enemies or other rival player bands in this awesome title from Aerie Digital.
I worked with the two amazing in-house artist at Aerie Digital - Isaac Hilyard and Zach Cunningham - to define the art style. Together, we crafted a look inspired by concert posters, irreverant adult animation, and comics. While this was happening, I figured out art pipelines. They're both highly skilled 2d artists but didn't have shippable 3d skills at the time, so the character and environment pipelines were both designed around having textures that were easy to paint and easy to swap. It played to their strengths and would ensure they could create new content for the game for years after my contract wrapped.
Videos
Images
An in-game shot from Battle Bands.
The Visual Development Triad. This is a framework I use when designing an art style to ensure the style is satisfying the various demands the game has for it. I formalized it on this project.
The visual development process for Battle Bands. The top image is the final mockup.
The game is 2d but the character art is technically modeled, rigged, and animated in 3d. A b/w detail texture and a color mask texture got combined in our main shader and allowed clothing colors to be customizable by the player. This approach was designed to enable the in-house 2d artists to be as productive as possible while also allowing us to use Unreals amazing animation tools.
The face tech had different parts that joined together in a specific way or sat in slightly different places along the depth axis, allowing players to customize the look of their character while retaining the benefits of our 3d-as-2d system.
We had different mesh shapes that acted as canvases for different clothing types, but they all used the same rig. This meant that regardless of what outfit or instrument you chose, the character would utilize the common animation set.
The band van needed to be as customizable as the characters, but it shows up in a handful of different angles in game. I made it 3d and gave it a texture that was easily edited. Then I morphed and skewed the mesh so its persective was correct in 2d, and flattened it so it could be placed in our 2d scenes.
Outfit concepts from Battle Bands.
The logo development process from Battle Bands. This one came together quickly.
The Bardbarian NPC band from Battle Bands.
The Arcade NPC band.
The dive bar sludge NPC band. This particular NPC also had a special shader I created to help its goo feel more gooey.
A rat NPC band that lives and plays under an overpass. This was the first NPC band we created and served as a test case for how these NPCS would be created.
