Blast Brigade: the creation of visual style

Recently, the art director of Blast Brigade, Yulia Krasheninnikova, took part in an interview with App2Top, where she shared an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how the game’s visual style was created. Today we would like to provide some highlights from this interview for you to get a better idea about the metroidvania aspect of Blast Brigade.

Working on the environment

The visual style of the project inherited a lot from its mobile predecessor Bombastic Brothers for several reasons. The main one was that the core mechanics of Bombastic were popular among the community, and the team wanted to further develop the idea. With this decision came an opportunity to expand on already successful concepts and take them even further.

How it started

Thus, using the existing assets from "Bombastic", we collected several fake shots, atmospheric and densely filled. After receiving the first results, we turned to programmers to find a technical pipeline that would allow us to implement our plans in the required quality. The previous mobile-based solution did not work as we needed much more advanced tools for editing levels and individual assets.

Moving to the new solution did not sort out all our problems, so the decision was made to simplify the graphics of the environment in favor of geometric styling, with clean silhouettes and a minimum of rounded shapes. With it being the next logical step, the idea of detailed rendering was abandoned in favor of working with blur, gradients, light effects and a small number of texture brushes.

Concept of the first biome we developed

The cartoon Klaus, released a few months earlier, only reinforced our belief in this style and became one of the main sources of inspiration for landscapes in Blast Brigade. Other reference titles, such as Samurai Jack, Carmen Sandiego, The Owl House impacted the atmosphere of 2D cartoons that we wanted to bring across.

Speaking of references, the preliminary stage of development - when choosing a setting - a mood board was prepared with graphics from the games that we wanted to focus on. Given the relation to Bombastic Brothers, there were of course titles like Streets of Rage, Broforce, Mercenary Kings and Metal Slug, while Ori, Monster Boy and Hollow Knight were the main landmarks for us in terms of genre.

Atmospheric concept in the new pipeline

As is the case with metroidvania titles, when working with the color palette, it was important to convey the atmosphere via the principles of warm-cold lighting, airy perspective and reflective light. In order not to lose units against the background of the colorful environment, all the characters and monsters were made in a slightly different style: having a uniform black outline and filled according to the cell-shading principle.

The colour palettes of different biomes

Working on Jeff

Each character has their own “passport” with a general description of the biography, traits and in-game abilities. Before starting the design for each hero, NPC, monster or boss, we first collected separate mood boards with references, while having discussions on the game mechanics linked to each character.

The main character (Jeff) is essentially a young version of himself from Bombastic Brothers. The idea was to portray him as a young, not fully hardened but still a goofy fan of explosions.

Experiments with proportions and detalization

The first version of his design for Blast Brigade looked rather aggressive and brutal, but later we decided to change his appearance towards a more charismatic and stylish guy who can express a much richer range of emotions than “I'm angry and brutal, this is where my personality ends”.

The main idea of the team was to convey the straightforward and purposeful character of the hero, and at the same time to show that he is not sly and witty but rather extremely direct. Subsequently, this opened up more opportunities for the introduction of comedic moments in dialogues and even partially influenced some of the storylines. Oh yes, there are multiple storylines to follow, though it’s a subject for another time.

Cool, cooler, coolest

And that’s it for today! Next time we will tell you even more about those who inhabit the charming vivid world of Blast Brigade, so follow our game and stay tuned!

Blast Brigade Team