Ryan: "OOH! That Looks Cool!"

Seeing as I am the art director for Ragball, I should probably discuss Ragball's art direction in this blog post. Before I say anything else, I want to make it clear that I do not take credit for the art in Ragball. I think it is absolutely amazing and that is only because of the amazing people that all worked on it. I couldn't have led a better team of geniuses.

Ragball started with the ideas of throwing each other and physics ragdolls. Aesthetics came as a result of the tone of the gameplay. Throwing people and watching goofy ragdolls is just that: goofy. We wanted to reinforce that with a visual style that is fun, lighthearted, and comedic. The evolution from there was natural. So it had some errors.

It made sense for the players to be literal ragdolls. The problem in that initial design was that ragdolls are really easy to make super creepy. We wanted to try hard not to make it look like the movie 9 or some weird voodoo puppet stuff. Luckily Cate is a wonderful concept artist so they have great saggy and wonky proportions that I was able to model and Austin was able to texture. In the six months of Ragball's development, the ragdolls are not only the one thing to not be replaced, but they haven't even needed a single iteration since their creation. Another massive touch was googley eyes. Trust me, "cute as a button" does not apply when it comes to eyes. Just watch Coraline.

Once we decided on Ragdolls, we had a few ways to go for the setting. We knew we wanted a court similar to Basketball, but what exactly was in it? What was outside of it? How did it work? Why is it there? Here are some of my early sketches on the look of the court (from back when the game was still called Buddyball.

As you can see, we didn't start with the whole toys and small things theme. At first the only "style" we had was not serious. That only got us so far. The lead contenders for setting were a semi-realistic court with bright colors vs. a spectated lab environment similar to Portal or the lab-rat style viewing of squash games. The lab environment idea was finally killed for being just about as far from fun as a setting can be. That left the court that looks like a court look. Lame. We did do well to establish a clear and appealing color pallet that has stuck with us to the present day.

Halfway through development our team doubled in size and we got a chance to step back and think about what we could improve. One of our biggest issues was that we had all these objects that didn't make sense. Everything was made of this plain and unrealistic plastic texture and the court had this half-baked realism idea that didn't belong in a real world or a dream. At long last we finally came to the realization Ragdolls are toys and this is a game. Simple right? Only took us three months to start treating them like toys. We took every single object in the game except for the dolls themselves and remade them. Arbitrary pipe things became funnels stuffed in paper towel tubes. The cartoon-y basketball court got drawn on cardboard. Solid colored banners got drawn in marker on taped-down notebook paper. It was a beautiful rebirth that made our game instantly look like it knew what it was, because it finally did.

Along with the idea of toys and small things came something I'd been wanting to play with for a while: tilt-shift. It's a simple camera effect that can make anything look like its tiny just by artificially shrinking the depth of field. The effect can be seen most recently in the new Zelda game, Link's Awakening. I got Lisa to mess with the idea and she knocked it out of the park. It is just one of the amazing little visual features we managed to implement and it goes a really long way.

Once the ball got rolling with the toy idea, we really went with it. I personally felt more confident in what did and didn't belong in the game. We made a menu that is just a desk with toys and doodles on it. We even made a trailer to look like a toy commercial. Something clicked and we were able to take the established theme and just keep throwing things at it. At this point, I am so proud of the art of Ragball that I enjoy just looking at it for the sake of looking at it. If the gameplay was horrendous (which it isn't by the way) I would still love just looking at the little ragdolls move in this tiny makeshift environment. I only feel so comfortable praising the art so much because it's not just me tooting my own horn. Like I said earlier, this game looks awesome and it wouldn't be the same without every one of the people that have helped work on it.

I'm just the guy that threw out dumb ideas until one wasn't actually dumb. I'm the guy that says "hey we should try this thing and see if it works." Most importantly, I'm happy to be the guy that says "OOH! That looks cool!".