FRACKED: ART DIRECTION

Fracked – A visual tone and direction

Fracked presents a bold, vivid, fast-paced, and dangerous world, both extreme and expressive with its use of colour and rendering.
With a strategy that is unapologetically bold in attitude and tone, purposefully built for VR, whilst also directly supporting the game pillars, the art-style quickly shaped and became woven into the gameplay and technology at hand.

The challenge: Delivering full, free-roaming, 3D, 360 combat arenas with fast-paced action and traversal, in VR. The wants were big and clear early on. That clarity of experience enabled us to strategise our rendering execution up front.

Function and style: Contrasting in their purest forms.

Legibility and accessibility to our world was the focus. A style that gave clarity in VR, not to mention clarity for interaction, cover, and traversal opportunities. We needed to create open spaces that served the core combat mechanics and locomotion in a slick, fast, frictionless way.

Leaning into the action, gun-ho, bombastic tone of an action movie, presented in a retro graphic novel inspired finish, was our route to delivering bold impressionistic overtones across a world that met both rendering and interaction expectations.

By focusing on a modeling fidelity that enabled the level of play pace and interaction required, we crafted a visual language that was void of fiddly details. This was optimal in rendering, with a sweet by-product of clarity. The chunky, clean, geometric, industrial shapes, cast against the natural slopes of a 45° mountainside, began to lend themselves to the exciting possibilities of our three-dimensional play space.

The vivid palette and impressionistic approach to surface detail and texturing served the rendering challenges as much as doubling down on the surreal and bombastic world and scenario you find yourself fighting for.

By avoiding complex material passes and traditional clamping processes that you normally see from shader driven graphic styles, we leaned into hand-illustrated textures and finishes. That gave us the flourishes and bespoke touches that are normally reserved for concept art or illustration. Our world production / 3D pipeline became an exercise in impressionism and composition. It was a real creative challenge for even the most competent 3D artists. The motivation was never realism, it was flow and legibility in a vivid and dangerous world. Anything that got in the way of that feeling was seriously scrutinised.

A truly artistic and illustrative approach to non-literal surfaces and shapes cemented the stylisation and uniqueness, whilst always re-enforcing the core clarity of play and flow, when frantically blasting your way through the fracked.

Fracked
“Extreme form from function, creating the base for a highly artistic, impressionist world.”