Pursuit Force Designer Diary #3 - The Art

In our previous Pursuit Force designer diaries, Bigbig Studios' managing director, Jonathan Webb, discussed the game's conception and gameplay design. In this our third designer diary, art director Simon Bursey talks about some of the specifics of the game's art style, including characters, vehicles, and the fictional locale of Capital City where much of the game takes place.

Capital City

By Simon Bursey
Art Director, Bigbig Studios

Pursuit Force was a very rewarding game to work on, with lots of variety and scope for creativity, and it's fun to play, too--but when you have to create the look of an original game, where do you start? My name's Simon Bursey, and I'm the art director at Bigbig Studios, but I spend most of my time heading up the animation and vehicle teams. Along with Chun Man Li, our lead environment artist, and Mark Ashcroft, our lead character artist, we and our teams designed the look of Capital City and the world of Pursuit Force.

When creating a new game like Pursuit Force, one difficult but essential challenge is to come up with a unified look for the game so that everything gels together. We're big fans of games here at Bigbig Studios, and we've always liked the visual style of Japanese, character-based action games. Like many of those, our game is inspired by the real world but not in a photo-realistic way.

Each discipline's lead artist, and their teams, concentrated on working out the art style from the start of the project. It's important that the look of the game suits how it plays, so we spent a lot of time working with the game designers to make sure that the art was heading in the right direction. Some of the initial designs looked subtle and cool, but soon we found that if we exaggerated things a little, making features bigger and bolder, the game looked so much better. This is an arcade-style action game, so we want to take reality and turn the volume up slightly so that everything stands out and works well on the PlayStation Portable screen. I've often heard our art style described as: "Like an action movie--exaggerated but still believable."

Some parts of the game look more over the top than others. The environments are realistic but use dramatic colors and bigger objects for visual impact. Civilians and their cars are designed to blend into the background, whereas the gang members and their vehicles are exaggerated so as to stand out; they have to be easy to see and be full of character. The gang bosses take this one step further. These are big, mean guys you wouldn't want to mess with--such as Don Capelli in his white tuxedo, who does business from his armoured limo, complete with a remote-controlled minigun in the trunk.

Environments
One of the great things about the routes you drive in Pursuit Force is that they never loop. That means we have about 200km of roads, tracks, and rivers, which needed to be filled with interesting scenery to keep the player entertained.

Once we have the overall theme for an environment, such as the desert or a freeway, the environment artists grab hundreds of photos so that we know how the scenery should look and feel. Each big area needs to be broken down, so working from these photos, we come up with zones you can drive through, like the farm area or industrial sector. The game designers create a basic route, and then the environment artists build on this by creating 3D models for all of the scenery, buildings, and objects. We also wanted to add a few surprises, so the player could end up turning off the main road and chasing speedboats under a glacier tunnel, riding the helicopter through a desert canyon, or even driving a sports car down the ski run on Snowstorm Peaks.

Characters
Pursuit Force is a hi-tech, crime-fighting force, with the best vehicles, weapons, and tactics, so from the start, we knew that the player would need some fitting adversaries. Petty criminals and felons breaking the speed limit just wouldn't be exciting enough, so we came up with the gangs of Capital City. The characters, the vehicles they drive, and the weapons they shoot are all designed to follow a unique theme and make the gang easily recognizable.

Like the ideas for environments and vehicles, many of the early ideas for gang characters came from photos. We knew that we wanted to create a Far Eastern gang, so we did some research and came up with a look that fused traditional Japanese elements such as samurai and sumo with more modern street fashion. This led us to the look of the deadly Killer 66. The local gangsters, the Capelli family, were inspired by clichéd mobster characters we see in movies--chunky Italian guys in suits who wear black and carry revolvers and tommy guns. We quickly found that the Convicts gang looked good in orange prison trousers, so we combined this with items they've stolen from the prison guards and police during their big breakout. The Warlords are a gang of ex-Special Forces soldiers, so their look was taken from military books and magazines and action movies like The Rock. Their boss, the General, pops up more than once in the game. He's inspired by the mean sergeant major characters in movies, combined with some of the top generals we saw on TV during the first Gulf War. The sexy Vixens were quite difficult to pin down. In an industry that's mostly guys, everyone has their own idea of what makes a sexy all-girl gang, so we went through a lot of different ideas beginning with a punk/gothic style and finally settling on something like Charlie's Angels wearing Kill Bill costumes, all unified by a racy red, white, and blue color scheme.

Vehicles
When you're chasing gang members at 180kmh through civilian traffic, their vehicles have to stand out, so every gang in Pursuit Force has a particular style and look to their vehicles. The Convicts drive crazy, cannibalized vehicles covered in graffiti, whereas the Killer 66 have upgraded, race-style Japanese cars.

To create a vehicle, we started by looking at photos and blueprints of real cars that would suit the gang, then we came up with something that has the feel of those real cars but are actually completely new vehicles. Finally, we added the colors, stripes, and stickers that let you spot them from a distance during a high-speed shoot-out.

Animation
You're always on the move in Pursuit Force--shooting, jumping, and clinging onto vehicles--and we had to create animations for everything the game characters can do, ranging from just standing around to hanging off the side of speedboats. Sometimes, we motion-capture real stunt-people, but some of the cop's moves are so death-defying, we just had to animate them by hand. Jumping onto a moving car and kicking the driver through the window is just one of the awesome moves the cop can pull off. Our animators have the challenge of making it work in the game--it's got to look cool, but believable too, and that's what makes a move fun to play.

Summary
It's amazing to look back and think that we started with a blank sheet of paper and ended up with art for around 50 characters and vehicles, 200km of scenery, and over 1,000 animations. We came up with the look for a whole new world, a great achievement that was made possible by talented individuals working here at Bigbig Studios.

In our next designer diary, we'll take a look inside the studios of Bigbig in the UK and find out what makes the team tick.

Characters
Pursuit Force is a hi-tech, crime-fighting force, with the best vehicles, weapons, and tactics, so from the start, we knew that the player would need some fitting adversaries. Petty criminals and felons breaking the speed limit just wouldn't be exciting enough, so we came up with the gangs of Capital City. The characters, the vehicles they drive, and the weapons they shoot are all designed to follow a unique theme and make the gang easily recognizable.

Like the ideas for environments and vehicles, many of the early ideas for gang characters came from photos. We knew that we wanted to create a Far Eastern gang, so we did some research and came up with a look that fused traditional Japanese elements such as samurai and sumo with more modern street fashion. This led us to the look of the deadly Killer 66. The local gangsters, the Capelli family, were inspired by clichéd mobster characters we see in movies--chunky Italian guys in suits who wear black and carry revolvers and tommy guns. We quickly found that the Convicts gang looked good in orange prison trousers, so we combined this with items they've stolen from the prison guards and police during their big breakout. The Warlords are a gang of ex-Special Forces soldiers, so their look was taken from military books and magazines and action movies like The Rock. Their boss, the General, pops up more than once in the game. He's inspired by the mean sergeant major characters in movies, combined with some of the top generals we saw on TV during the first Gulf War. The sexy Vixens were quite difficult to pin down. In an industry that's mostly guys, everyone has their own idea of what makes a sexy all-girl gang, so we went through a lot of different ideas beginning with a punk/gothic style and finally settling on something like Charlie's Angels wearing Kill Bill costumes, all unified by a racy red, white, and blue color scheme.

Vehicles
When you're chasing gang members at 180kmh through civilian traffic, their vehicles have to stand out, so every gang in Pursuit Force has a particular style and look to their vehicles. The Convicts drive crazy, cannibalized vehicles covered in graffiti, whereas the Killer 66 have upgraded, race-style Japanese cars.

To create a vehicle, we started by looking at photos and blueprints of real cars that would suit the gang, then we came up with something that has the feel of those real cars but are actually completely new vehicles. Finally, we added the colors, stripes, and stickers that let you spot them from a distance during a high-speed shoot-out.

Animation
You're always on the move in Pursuit Force--shooting, jumping, and clinging onto vehicles--and we had to create animations for everything the game characters can do, ranging from just standing around to hanging off the side of speedboats. Sometimes, we motion-capture real stunt-people, but some of the cop's moves are so death-defying, we just had to animate them by hand. Jumping onto a moving car and kicking the driver through the window is just one of the awesome moves the cop can pull off. Our animators have the challenge of making it work in the game--it's got to look cool, but believable too, and that's what makes a move fun to play.

Summary
It's amazing to look back and think that we started with a blank sheet of paper and ended up with art for around 50 characters and vehicles, 200km of scenery, and over 1,000 animations. We came up with the look for a whole new world, a great achievement that was made possible by talented individuals working here at Bigbig Studios.

In our next designer diary, we'll take a look inside the studios of Bigbig in the UK and find out what makes the team tick.