Flock Art Direction
A selection of Art direction work for Flock.
Everything from really rough sketches through to polished concept art, and then also writing, draw-overs, photo-reference, whatever gets the ideas across best.
Note. there are some spoilers here, in case you haven’t played the game and are planning to.
NPC designs.
We had no end of trouble getting this place right.
Creature designs with behavioural notes.
This was the first bit of the game we finished. The vErTiCaL sLiCe
I love a draw-over.
No idea what these are.
Very early concept art.
Sometimes you can kind of make a collage of screenshots to mock up something new.
Another mixture of collage and draw-over.
A draw-over before and after. The top image is the original screenshot.
None of this artificial-heart stuff made it into the game.
Looks like I re-used that millstones sketch, probably months later. Sometimes in art-direction you have to repeat yourself.
And sometimes you have to just make the thing, dump it in the level, take screenshots and then remove it again. These didn’t make it into the finished game.
I guess this is a ‘mood-board’. I don’t like to use them much and when I do it is as reference for specific details, architectural, botanical etc, rather than as creative ‘inspiration’. There are nearly always notes or accompanying sketches. I don’t like mood-boards that are about conveying a vibe and I don’t like mood-boards that are a bunch of screenshots from other videogames.
Also a mood-board. A lot of these photos are from one book, California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks by Amir Zaki. His photos are gorgeous. I would argue though that my interest here is more in the architectural details. I try not to use the work of other artists or designers in art direction. Hopefully it goes without saying that I do not use generative AI.
Sketchbook stuff is always going to be the backbone of art direction for me but sometimes you just have to push the boat out with a fancy bit of high-polish concept art like this. I think Ricky still has this as his desktop background :^)
Mocking up these three-dimensional UI elements was fun. Those rings look cool but wern’t right for the game. The floating health bar thingy did make it.
Early concept for the creature guide.
The final creature guide. I worked closely with Olly Hoff on this.
Map concept.
The final map.
One of the last things I did on Flock is also perhaps my favorite. These knitting-pattern covers are awarded to the player throughout the game and they unlock clothing options. Rianna curated and named all the collections and I had a grand time illustrating them.