Happy Holidays to everyone, “RetroStyle Games” team wishes you productive and pleasing 2012 year!

We have updated our portfolio with more than 180 recent images of 8 different categories:

Additionally we have changed our gallery engine and now:
- it’s easier to maintain everything from our side
- there is full-screen mode so you can view images at higher resolution with all the details
- there is better SEO and per-image description
- overall usability of our gallery should be improved

We have restructured categories a bit, so now there are:

Game Interfaces – GUI, HUD, Windows, Buttons, Overall UI Style

3D Modeling – Next-Gen Characters, Low-poly Modeling, Texturing

Game Backgrounds – Painterly, Illustrative Stages and Game Style

Concepts – Characters, Environment and Game Style Researches

Icons – 2D and 3D Game Tiles, Chips, Objects, Cursors and more

Vector / Flash Artwork – Icons, Costumes, Game Elements, Backgrounds, Flash Animation

Game Sprites – Pre-Rendered 2D / 3D Elements with Post-Processing or Over-paint

CG Animation – 3D Animation, Video Presentation and Flash or Hand-drawn Animation

Don’t hesitate to contact us in case of possible cooperation!

Some of our team members are big fans of Uncharted series (and Naughty Dog studio). Anticipating the release of UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception one of our great artists decided to draw Drake’s Fan Art in spare time.

Here is mid resolution for blogs:

And bigger resolution without our sign (1920×1200) which can be used as desktop wallpaper:
http://www.retrostylegames.com/blog/artwork/uncharted-drake-desert-fanart-big-resolution.jpg

Don’t forget to Share/Like the post if you like it

With a slight delay, but we would like to share a great news with our readers. A couple of months ago our regular art outsourcing client Kristanix Games asked us to help them to create game graphics or rather virtual prototype of their new idea.

Their government has a program which rewards indie developers with money grants, so they decided to jump into competition with their new game.  Deadline was pretty short, so really small part of real game was developed. Basically we just visualized their rough ideas and helped them to prepare illustrative material for judges…

Waiting for results took some time but recently Tor Martin (co-founder of Kristanix) sent a happy mail to us:

Just wanted to let you know that we were one of 5 projects that got funding for Heroes Guild! It’s in Norwegian but here’s the announcement:
http://www.nfi.no/Bransje+%26+tilskudd/Tildelinger+%26+informasjonsarkiv/Tildelinger+2011/Interaktive+produksjoner/Heroes+Guild.92228.cms

We got about US $27,000! We are working on a prototype for it now (currently working on the level editor). After we’ve finished up the prototype, figured out what we want to have in the game etc., we will start with the graphics. We will probably do some small concept testing with the graphics while working on the prototype too, though to find out what exact style fits best, but the main chunks of the graphics we can start on after the prototype is done.

We started up a Facebook page for the game as well:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heroes-Guild/106617172762686

So congratulations to Kristanix Games and their new Heros Guild development! This time they decided to target more hard-core audience. Be sure to check http://www.kristanix.com/heroesguild/ later on, when they put more information there.

Now, I would like to demonstrate some of the artwork and in-progress images done for Heroes Guild. Remember, that we were under tight deadlines, but the main goal of getting the funds was accomplished

Basically we were asked to produce:
- strategy-like isometric view of heroes town with a couple of special buildings
- dungeon level with more straight isometric view, similar to Diablo hit
- stylized GUI elements
- game title/logo/icon featuring 3 main characters (wizard, archer and swordsman)

The Town

We started with rough buildings concepts (blacksmith, guard tower, horse-stable and wizards tower).

Then we proceed with rough background mock-up and a couple of GUI ideas.

Because of tight deadlines we had no chance to polish town area further, but final image was happily approved by client and should show game idea in full spectrum.

The Dungeon

As always – really rough concept idea. Client wanted straight isometric look similar to most old-school and modern RPG games.

Then we built a 3D scene, populated it with various objects (monsters, skeletons, chests, barrels and more), pre-rendered everything with orthographic camera and heavily edited in post.

The Title

Again, rough idea with 3 main characters (wizard, archer and swordsman) and basic logo searches.

These are two final title illustrations we had a chance to polish just in time for competition final. Different style, different look, still show the main idea.

When competition was already over, we got more free time and came up with 3rd variant of Heroes Guild title which looks much more complete.

Be sure to check art production testimonials on our Contact page:
http://www.retrostylegames.com/index.php?action=support
And our Art Outsourcing 2D/3D portfolio here:
http://www.retrostylegames.com/artwork

RetroStyle Games team is happy to share new fan-art illustration created by one of our great artists.
Meet Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter series :

Inspired by darkest antagonist of the Harry Potter universe and to be released soon “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2″

You can download bigger variant of Lord Voldemort fan art without our sign here:
http://retrostylegames.com/blog/artwork/harry-potter-voldemort-fan-art-high-res.jpg

Not so long ago we were contacted by Jake Birkett, owner of Grey Alien Games and man behind such BigFishGame’s hits like Fairway Solitaire, Unwell Mel and some other great games.

The task sounded simple – he needed some art for his new Easter-themed game which was based on his Holiday Bonus engine.

Probably it’s worth checking the game itself, especially taking into account that it was already released at Grey Alien Games website and soon to be released on most of the casual games portals:
http://www.greyaliengames.com/springbonus/index.php

Original list of assets looked like that:
- Game Logo
- Loading Screen bar/text
- Map Screen dot and bottom panel
- Options screen: Checkbox/mark, slider bar/knob
- Various button sizes
- Various dialog sizes (inc. in-game menu, level complete screen + more)
- 7 game pieces + a golden egg (special piece)
- 9 bonus pieces and 3 special particles
- 3 grid tiles, ice cube, and related particles
- 12 border pieces + special border overlays
- In-game Gui (left side, score area, time area, bonus gauge area, goal area, menu button)
- Mouse cursor

But as with any development – list of final items was slightly updated and reworked during art and game production.
And while originally it looked like relatively simple job it was ended as pretty complex task, especially taking into account really short deadline.

As usually, we started with some rough concepts for the game-field and game’s interface elements.
We tried to fit our first tries with backgrounds created by other artist and spring atmosphere we were feeling, but in final art direction was changed to something more generic, less stylized but still nice and cool looking. Partially GUI was inspired by Season Match.

Originally it was planned to use pre-rendered 3D elements for all the game-field chips, bonuses and probably tiles. Jake wanted something similar in terms of style to his previous Holiday Bonus game.
We like 3D and do it nice, but for consistency and cuter look prefer to use hand-drawn 2D art for casual games we are working on. And while 3D can save some time if you need cute animations (Jake planned to have them) it requires a bit more time to create 3D model itself and balance final visuals with 2D environment.

Because of that and also because of tight deadline we suggested Jake to go with fully hand-drawn graphics and leave misc animations as optional work for later stage.

Pay attention to really cute frog concept
Tiles were based on the idea of melting snow/ice and it was planned to use the same idea for backgrounds originally. They should be changing their state from frozen winter images to warm spring scenery, but in final there was no enough time to implement that idea both in code and art.

Final set of match-3 chips, tiles and bonus icons created by our team.

After Spring Bonus main GUI elements were chosen and polished we proceed to creation of universal constructor for windows, buttons and other interface elements.

Simultaneously we were working on probably most important game’s thing – Logo. From a couple of ideas Jake chosen the one of blue color, which reads and stands out well.

Additionally we created sand clock animation, rainbow power-up indicator animation and couple of other misc animations.

Currently Jake is finishing porting of Spring Bonus to other platforms (such as Windows mobile and iPhone/iPad) and we are helping with some miscellaneous work needed for that.
You can read Jake Birkett’s testimonial about the cooperation with RetroStyle Games team below:

Well I’d like to thank you for a job well done.  Everything you’ve done looks top quality and everyone loves the look and feel of them game.  I believe it’s going to do very well.

Be sure to check other testimonials on our Contact page:
http://www.retrostylegames.com/index.php?action=support
And our Art Outsourcing 2D/3D portfolio here:
http://www.retrostylegames.com/artwork

Hi all, first of all we would like to show CG cinematic we did for “Pirates Mysteries” Hidden Object game:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS2DQNB70ig

Now let’s proceed to a bit more detailed “Making of“. We would like to use minimal amount of words and let illustrations speak for themselves.

At the middle of last year Kristanix Games contacted us and proposed to do test job for a couple of tasks one of which was connected with interface creation for pirates-themed HOG (hidden object game).

We were provided with task description, temporal art and some mock ups.

Usually we begin work with big number of rough concepts which can quickly help to define art direction, demonstrate our ides to client and get further approval.

So “Kristanix” had chosen a series of HOG Panel, Dialogs window and Options ideas. We polished them further.

Here you can see more examples of drawn game interface elements done for “Pirate Mysteries” and a couple of miscellaneous projects.

After 2D GUI production we proceed to Mini-games creation. Again, we were provided with detailed instructions for most of the games and even working prototypes.

Incas Gems mini game

Land of Dead mini game

Pirates Map mini game

Sand Clock mini game

Sun Tower mini game

Witch house mini game

On final stages we were asked to produce pre-rendered intro CG Cinematic, game logo, title screen and a couple of misc. elements.

Originally “Kristanix” team wanted to use story-board like intro animation, consisted of cut out 2D elements with simple game-engine animation. We did some concepts and started to discuss possible ways of improving that direction.

Among new ideas were — bringing more life using After Effects animation or creation whole intro in pre-rendered 3D.
After checking “Aurum CG Short” we did awhile ago “Kristanix” decided to give us more freedom doing intro in 3D.

Additionally, we were provided with some 3D sources done by other studio and used in production of hidden object scenes. We used some of them (for example crushed ship base) to build our own 3D models, but most of the stuff was heavily re-done.
Along with CG Animation production we were asked to improve Hidden Object intro level.

When all 3D models were ready we proceed to creation of CG animatic which helped us to feel the tempo, atmosphere and duration of the intro short.

As last touches we produced title screen, game’s logo, icon, cursor and also loop-able clip of Storm Sea.

It was a pleasure to work on that game with “Kristanix Games”. Looking forward to cooperate on new projects with them!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZpbjEA7TeQ

“Pirate Mysteries” hidden object game is available on Kristanix homepage:
http://www.kristanix.com/piratemysteries/ also at Appstore, BigFish Games and couple of other game portals.

Thank you for you interest, don’t forget to share/like this page.
Check out more examples of our Art Production services:
http://www.retrostylegames.com/index.php?action=artwork

Hi there, “RetroStyle Games” team would like to wish you best winter holidays and coming St Valentine’s day.
Let the love and health be with you!

To celebrate everything we wanted to share some of the holiday-themed icons we had in our collection. Read more to download them.

Most of the icons were done by our new trainee artist and slightly polished by our main artists. All of them were saved as transparent PNGs and come in different resolutions inside of ZIP packages you can download by the links below.
These Christmas and St Valentine icons can be used for free in any type of projects. They can suit match-3 prototype, online game, Facebook application or you can just decorate any of your artwork.

St Valentine free icons collection
Includes such 512×512, 128×128 and 64×64 icons:
- St Valentine opened love letter
- St Valentine closed love letter with heart stamp
- St Valentine arrow-pierced loving heart
- St Valentine heart-shaped strawberry

Download: http://retrostylegames.com/artwork/st-valentine-heart-presents-free-icons-collection.zip

Christmas and New Year presents simple match-3 icons pack
Includes 64×64 icons:
wineglass, cute cartoon snowman, snowflake, new year tree sock, Christmas presents, winter sled, new year tree ball decoration, Santa’s hats, tasty pie, cartoon moon, bells, champagne, corks, candies and candle.

Download: http://retrostylegames.com/artwork/christmas-new-year-presents-free-icons-pack.zip

Christmas and New Year online game presents icons
This pack includes eight 256×256 icons done for our friends from http://dreamfoot.net/
We did around 50 in-game presents and other kind of icons for them. Players can grant each other with these presents in game.

Download: http://retrostylegames.com/artwork/dreamfoot-net-christmas-presents-icons.zip

If you’ll find these icons helpful or useful in some way – let us know.
As was mentioned previously – they are FREE for any use. You can credit our team or link to our site if you’d like.
And don’t forget to Share/Like this page using Facebook widget at the bottom.

Thank you for you interest and downloads!

Almost a year ago we were asked to create a series of game sprites and tiles for Dreamspike Studios turn-based strategy game “Bronze“. It was necessary to keep everything on budget and also meet the style of previously created illustrations.
Recently we were contacted by Alex Kutsenok of Dreamspike Studios with information that “Bronze” was released! Moreover – it was reviewed in one of the biggest USA games magazine – PC Gamer #210 (check out page 74) and currently it’s gaining a lot of positive reviews from strategy lovers from all over the world.

While “Bronze” can look somehow outdated and simplified nowadays – it really delivers on strategy side of things and has this nice retro-felling of old good games.
We have created big amount of seamless game tiles for Bronze to have enough assets to build game map. There are more than 10-20 variants in each category: sea tiles, rivers, deserts, deposits, buildings, bridges and misc environment objects.

The hardest thing was to keep everything seamlessly tile-able and to build enough variations to natural tiles and their combination. Also we have created more than 10 different buildings and other structures for player to choose from. In final “Bronze” game seems to have enough personality to stand out!

In “Bronze”, from Dreamspike Studios, gamers have a chance to rewrite history. As supreme ruler of one of twelve historically based civilizations the player is charged with expanding their civilization’s territory by creating Farms, Towns, Embassies, Ziggurats, and even Armies. Construction is as easy as a click, and in no time at all your empire can stretch from map edge to map edge.

You can read more about “Bronze” game and try the Demo on site of their published:
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Dreamspike_Studios/BRZ/BRZ_page.html

Among nice positive “Bronze” reviews you can find:

“But it’s another thing to learn a game by watching the AI play and having something click in my head. “Ah-ha, so that’s how you use that!” It’s been a long time since an AI taught me about a game.” - Tom Chick, Fidgit

“Strategy veterans should find a lot to like here thanks to the quality AI and unique mechanics.” – James Allen, Out of Eight PC Game Reviews

“Bronze is a remarkably elegant design. Worth playing.” – Soren Johnson, Lead Designer, Civilization IV

“Dress-Up Pups” – is match-3 game based on idea of cute outfits creation for dogs and puppies. You play for the Pattie character, which is working in special kind of fashion agency for dogs. Her boss is planning vacancy and asks Pattie to be in charge while he is away. It’s a good opportunity for Pattie (and the player) to show how good she can deal with the business.

Game was created by RetroStyle Games and AnaWiki Games teams and is available from our site and a number of game portals: http://retrostylegames.com/index.php?action=dress-up-pups-match-3

We began work on our first match-3 game right after the release of Mars Miner in order to try our hand at the already thriving casual games market.
The project, under the working title of “Fashion Life”, combined within itself match-3 and dress-up functionality. At that point the dress-up concept was pretty unique, or at least not popular enough to inspire us, as we came up with it all on our own and failed to find anything of the sort present on the market at the time.

Under dress-up mechanic idea of cloth gathering with further applying to game character figurine was meant.

The project’s ambitious nature and complex design expanded swiftly. We even wanted to include some “The Sims”-like elements, allowing the player to develop their character, go to work, make money, visit various events and pick out appropriate clothing for each occasion. And that’s not mentioning the minigames. However, the short term goal was attracting gaming portals, publishers and investors.

We prepared a demo version of “Fashion Life” (with SDDs in two languages) to present at a casual software development competition in Russia (alas, can’t recall the name). The demo was still pretty far from the final product but we hoped that the judges would grant due praise for the potential, graphics and team behind our idea.

Needless to say, everything turned out quite differently from what we expected. The amount of feedback we acquired was minimal and the amount of investors that took notice of our project nonexistent. That along with a number of other reasons led to the eventual death of the “Fashion Life” project.
After a year or so, I began noticing a number of games that combined the concepts of time management and dress-up. The ideas in and of themselves weren’t anything unique of course, but I just found comfort in our ideas becoming a reality in some way.

I could end this sad tale with the above image but I’d like to continue.

After a while our team decided to take another look at “Fashion Life” and reevaluate our view of the casual games market. As a result, we came to the conclusion that the game was too complex and ambitious for a starter project, so we decided to work on a match-3 game again.
This time around we decided to create a product with an optimal minimum amount of features: a simple but attractive match-3 game and nothing more. I hope that clarifies the purpose of the above image.

So the reworked “Fashion Life” concept became the “Dogs’ Fashion” project. Furthermore, we were inspired by a “Maxim” magazine article on clothing for dogs along with all the cute images related to the topic.

We began developing “Dogs’ Fashion” at a good pace. My CG-business partners invested some funds and promised ongoing support and quality control, which even allowed us to outsource some of the work and noticeably increase the development of the game’s graphics.

At that time, RetroStyle Games only had its own projects to deal with, without any art outsourcing as per our current services: http://retrostylegames.com/index.php?action=artwork

This allowed us to swiftly finish up a sizeable amount of graphical elements including 15 detailed backgrounds, more than 10 characters, icons for the game and a foundation for the upcoming interface, along with completed dialogues and a simple plot.
But our coding efforts just couldn’t match that pace…

When the development of the game’s graphics was coming to a close, we began focusing on creating levels and balancing the game. A number of disputes regarding this particular aspect of the development process and a few others coupled with slow coding progress severely dampened our spirits and motivation.
As a result, the team decided to take a break without giving up on the project.

Due to post-crisis financial troubles at the time, all project participants needed financial support. As such, working on “Dogs’ Fashion” had to be coupled with regular outsourced projects and even with full-time work for some, which clearly didn’t improve the overall development pace for the project.

The game survived in a half frozen state for another half a year. At that point, I reviewed my views on work as a whole and decided to take up RetroStyle Games again but this time in a more focused manner. We began providing graphical outsourcing services on a much larger scale and also took a dive into iPhone app development.

One of our clients turned out to be Roman Budzowski from AnaWiki Games. After successful work on “Perfect Tree”, “Soccer Cup Solitaire” and a number of other projects, we decided to revive the “Dogs’ Fashion” project using our graphics capabilities and Roman’s “kung-fu coder skills”, as he put it.

The new “Dogs’ Fashion” engine provided the game with three match-3 modes instead of just one: swap, chains and group. On top of that, we decided to add collectable items, alter the storyline and add a female character.

At first, we didn’t want to implement a single primary character. It was our understanding that a single character concept wouldn’t be enjoyable for all players. As such, we had first decided to let players experience the story from a first-person view, which is what we based the interface and other elements on.

The new view of the game resulted in having to rework the storyline and the creation of the main character named Pattie. Her boss – the CEO of the Dogs’ Fashion Agency – was at first named Pier de Bone. However, that name was later changed to Bernard so that our writer could insert St. Bernard jokes.

The changes to the featured characters resulted in a need to redraw the comic strips featured in the game as well as another look at the game’s name.
Since neither of the developers were native English speakers, we chose from a list of potential new game names provided by a Canadian writer:

Canine Couture
Simple alliteration

Dressed to the Canines
This is a pun on a well-known English expression “dressed to the nines,” meaning dressed up in high fashion, e.g. in a tuxedo

Dogs on the Catwalk
The “catwalk” is what fashion models walk on. But the fact that it includes “cat” makes it a good pun when you combine it with dogs

Doggy Divas (or Dog Show Divas)
More alliteration

Dress-up Pups
Rhyming, rather than alliteration

Four-Legged Fashionistas (or Furry Fashionistas)
Yet more alliteration

Bow Wow!
Bow-wow is one of many English onomatopoeia for a dog barking. But “Wow!” is of course an interjection to express surprise and being impressed.

The Russian members of the team found some of the names to be rather humorous, but in the end, everyone supported “Dress-Up Pups”, especially since the term “dress-up” had already been present in our previous prototype of the game (Fashion Life) and allowed us to work with the renowned dress-up game genre akin to games like Dress-Up Cats, Dress-Up Girls and so on.

At first we planned on granting players points for each level they passed (points meant to be exchanged for outfit elements). This would’ve ensured that players received access to higher level clothing items based on how well they did at the game. The way this was intended to work can be seen from the screenshot below, however, the concept didn’t make it into the final version of the game.

Roman considered such mechanics to be too hardcore and relatively boring, since the player ended up seeing the same dog for lengthy periods of time.

Keeping that in mind along with a desire to diversify the match-3 game modes, we decided to introduce collectable items (“Around the World in 80 Days”, “Deep Blue Sea II”, etc.). We also implemented a puzzle minigame (put together to display an image of a dressed up pup), thus making puzzle pieces fill the role of collectible items.

In the end, we had developed 10 images of dogs and 30 clothing items for them (though not all of them made it into the final version), 12 backgrounds, 3-4 menu background options, over 40 icons, tiles, comics, interface elements and more.
As a result, we had created around 190 game levels total.

Work on the game began anew in August of this year, and by October we were already testing the end result and sending the pre-final version to gaming portals and publishers. Considering that part of the graphics, concept creation and prototype development were ready beforehand, the game took around 4-5 months to complete in total.
At first Delphi and Asphyre engine was used, later on – BlitzMax.

Overall, I had fired myself up and burned out over the game several times. But in the end, I just had to get it finished and put it out there.
As a result, we did it, and I hope that the story from this point on will be a bit less purposeless and on a bit of a larger scale.

For now the game is available on our sites and at BigFishGames where it’s reached ^3rd place among the top match-3 games list and ^51st in the overall top list in the past few days:
http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/10273/dressup-pups/index.html

I would also like to mention that particular publisher’s interesting survey process here, but I’m not sure whether that information can be released to the public. Anyway, everything what’s happening to your game is real fun and pure interest.

Thanks go out to everyone who took part in the project:
our tight development team, the team at Anawiki Games as well as Vlad Tkach and Alexey Prokopyev for helping me get all of this off the ground back when it was all just a dream.

Thanks also go out to my past CG-business partners for inspiring us and giving us the foundation for the project’s beginning, even though in the end we finished it likely in spite of that help rather than because of it.

And last but not least, thanks to Andrey Oleynik (http://dreamfoot.net/) for hosting, support and assistance with our site.

Thank you for your interest and reading!

Just a quick character illustration done by one of our great artists and inspired by Halloween.