Fortnite has to be one of the most amazing games ever created.
It broke the record for the most players at one time at 10.8 million.
In 2018 the game made over 2.4 billion, which is crazy!
The story behind how they created
the locations and characters is pretty fascinating.
What amazes me is the creativity behind the game,
and how the designers use every element of art to
make what you love to play.
(awesome music playing)
The elements of art really are the building blocks for how we look at every
area of art, including game design.
Line, shape, value, texture, form, and space each
element is pretty important, and each builds off the others.
Line is where almost everything begins,
it creates movement, gives a path shape and that shape leads to form.
For the team at Fortnight line, shape, and form quickly
became incredibly important.
Every character and environment had to be created using line
often taking reality, simplifying it, and then reimagining it for
the creative world within the game.
Line does much more than simply create
shapes, it can also direct your eye and the designers at fortnight knew that.
Check out this scene.
Line directs your eye to the floor, which gives you the
illusion of 3d space, you feel like you could walk into the room
and it directs you to a point.
Believe it or not, artists have been doing this for years.
Just check out the Last Supper painted by Leonardo da Vinci, which is so similar.
Da Vinci used one-point perspective to create a 3d space, and check out how the
artists use invisible lines using hands and eyes to draw your attention to the center.
Pretty amazing, right, and this was in 1490.
Each Fortnight character seems to do something similar.
Check out how the body shape is similar to a V, which
directs your eye up towards their face and weapons.
Once these lines are combined they create shape.
Shape is two-dimensional, and in the case of
Fortnite basic shapes are key to building ideas into reality.
The team at Fortnite knew they wanted to use shapes inspired by previous movies, game and tech.
Artists in the past have done this in the past, in fact, Picasso was inspired by ancient
Egyptian paintings that use flat, two-dimensional shapes with exaggerated eyes.
Now, form is different than shape.
A good way to think about form is it has
three dimensions; height ,width, and depth, like a cylinder or box.
Form is what truly redefined the gaming experience.
Just check out the difference in these
two characters, 2d vs. 3d, depth was game changing pun intended.
Form in fortnight became its signature. Everything from building streetlights,
walls, windows, gas pumps, to couches all use unique forms that bulge, pinch, and taper.
It became so important that they had to develop a style sheet so everyone
on the team would be on the same page.
With the development of each character
the team focused less on edgy lines and planes, and went for smooth designs,
which you can see on the faces.
Once the style and form of the game was created, color was determined.
Color includes hue, chroma, or intensity, and value, light to dark.
The original concepts for the characters were incredibly dark, but the team at
EPIC decided the colors needed to be bright with plenty of contrast.
Check out the difference.
See how the bright purple and blues contrast against
the characters colors with incredible chroma or intensity.
One of my favorite examples of color contrast in the art world is from artist Kehinde Wiley.
Check out the way he used contrast between the green floral background and the dark
blue and browns of the chair in Obama's suit.
Pretty amazing contrast using intense colors.
What truly brought the game of Fortnite to a whole new level was texture.
In order to create the right texture real photos were taken and then
artists would hand paint them in order to get just the right feel for the game.
The lived-in world was incredibly important and artists achieved this
through texture on almost every surface.
Most impressive are new additions like
on the side of this building.
Texture makes everything feel so real!
However, color, texture, and form are nothing without value.
Value is the degree of light to dark and it creates the mood from everything inside
paintings to game design.
If you want a room to look like something out of the apocalypse,
then value is crazy important.
One of my favorite examples of value is
The Flower seller by Diego Rivera. It amazes me how the extreme light to
dark makes the flowers just pop off the canvas.
The last element we have to talk about is space.
Space is everything in Fortnite.
Space is simply the distance between or round shapes and objects.
One super creative way the team at EPIC
created space is by using fog along with value.
This gives the perception or feel
that some objects are further away since they become blurry through the fog.
Creating these distances between objects is not easy!
A real-life example is the legendary work
of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and his famous design called Falling Water.
By designing huge chunks of the house essentially floating above
the water negative space was created between.
Of course, the game designers at EPIC knew how to take the exact same idea
and put it in the game.
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I hope you now appreciate how amazing the elements of art can be, and how you
can build upon each one to create something, well, as awesome as Fortnite!
Until next time, Be Artrageous!