The Art of Dungeoneering

I'm used to working by myself when it comes to game making. And one area where I am sadly challenged is in the realm of art. I tend to use free game art, or hack together my own programmer art, and in general I was happy with what I could produce. But I now realise I was completely wrong.

I've recently started collaborating with a super artist called Fred Mangan for Guild of Dungeoneering and he has produced some absolutely beautiful work that blows what I had put together right out of the water. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to work on a game with my own nasty art again!

Did you spot the little pencils?

That's the new logo for Guild of Dungeoneering. Lets compare it with what I had made..

Font + icon in two colours. Pretty much the limit of my abilities!

I think we can all agree that's a pretty big difference in quality! Read on to see a whole load more of Fred's art for Guild of Dungeoneering.

Finding an artist

Once I had a playable prototype of my game at the end of October I decided to try and find an artist to collaborate with. I posted up a job ad in a few different game art forums and tweeted about it. After a week I had a decent number of people get in touch with me about it.

I narrowed these down to a shortlist of three and set up a short skype call with each of them to talk about the project. In the end I picked Fred Mangan but it wasn't an easy decision. All of them were that happy combination of friendly & talented. I was surprised how easy the process was.

Picking a style

Before I made the decision to try and find an art partner I was thinking about how I could do original art for Dungeoneering myself. One idea I had was to go with a crude hand-drawn look by actually drawing everything myself on blue graph paper and then scanning it in. This would have the neat advantage of looking a bit like those old D&D maps you might have drawn on graph paper back in the day.

Myself and Fred decided this idea was worth pursuing as a 'look' for the game once he got on board. He quickly churned out a full set of replacement tiles of different kinds of corridors and rooms that would slot in together to form a map, and all in a style that looked like it had been drawn in pencil on blue graph paper. Over the next few weeks he created more and more art and I have to say I think he really nailed it. Guild of Dungeoneering has never looked so good!

The title screen. Check out the Gambrinous logo in the game's style :D

Concept of a dungeon exploration run

The hero – he'll dress up in weapons & armour as he finds them

Some monster sprites

If you are interested in the game you can try playing it here, or have a look at the Tigsource devlog thread or the Facebook page to see what's coming next. Thanks!

Thanks for reading! Now check out Guild of Dungeoneering, a game I'm making where you build the dungeon instead of controlling the hero! \o/