Building Concepts

A couple of days ago I blogged about about the car designs I made for our upcoming game (side note: I really should announce the game's name already, since it's really nothing spectacular, but I feel like I've held off for so long that I might as well keep up the charade).  Now I want to show off some of the designs I came up with for the buildings that populate our game, and share the design philosophy(!) that went behind them.

Once again I turn to the amazing The Art of Monsters vs. Aliens. In the section under environments there's a two page spread of the art they used for the golden gate bridge.  I don't know if it's legible, but there's a phrase that's written there a couple of times : Add wonky detail.  For whatever reason this phrase stuck with me, and I took it to heart when designing the buildings.

Speaking of designing, I highly suggest that any designer always have a sketchbook with them.  You never know when you'll need to kill time, and you might as well be productive while doing it!  The sketches above were made while Aissa and I were in line renewing our driver's licences.  What usually took only a couple of hours ended up taking the entire day because the renewal center's card machine got busted.  Luckily for me I needed to design some office/residential skyscrapers, and we were stuck in Makati.  These sketches are pretty stylized but if you're ever in the Ayala MRT station, find the LTO license renewal center and look out  across EDSA and you might spot one of the buildings I used as a reference.

Back to being "wonky", so my basic design instruction to myself was "straight outside, wonky inside".  What I meant by that was that the outside lines of the buildings should be straight and clean, but the insides should be a little wonky.  So you'll notice that the floors of the upper right corner building are all symmetrical, but the stuff inside like the windows, aircon etc. are all a little different from each other.  I think this makes things interesting since there's a contrast between controlled and wonky shapes.  Actually if you look closely (or maybe not even) you'll notice that I don't really stick to that rule the whole time, but at the very least if I try to keep that in mind it helps to keep the design of the buildings unified.