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Behind the Scenes: Cozy Farm Illustration
🕑 Added 2024-08-24 16:15:41 +0000 UTC
I got quite interested into the cozy life sim game genre. If you don't know what that's about, it's the games like Stardew Valley or Nintendo's Animal Crossing. What I really like about these games, they simplify the complexity of RPG and strategy elements, while still keeping quite a lot of depth to keep you engaged, but on the other hand often offer a lot of freedom and customization.
And I especially like aesthetics of these games. Since they are targeting more chill and casual gaming audience, the graphics try to follow. So you always get treated by colorful stylized design, cute elements and whimsical atmosphere.
I wanted to do another game asset inspired diorama to continue my unofficial series, but this time I felt more inspired by the cozy game universe, than classical town builder strategy games.
Visit the full Pinboard here
So when filling up my Pinterest board while searching for inspiration, I expanded my search with some "cozy game" elements. This really helped me to enrich my existing palette. I always look for ways how to deviate at least a bit from already walked paths.
Even if it's just a little bit of wider inspiration source. I don't want to en up cemented in the same style and aesthetics over and over. I always want to feel a bit of new excitement.
While combing through the inspiration shots, I really liked the idea of a windmill to combine with some farm crop elements. The farm crops are often what the cozy game is about. You walk around and pick grown crops to progress through the game. So I thought it would be nice to give some prominent attention to those as well.
Of course, finding the inspiration is one thing, putting together a cohesive scene another. This is where my iPad with Procreate comes in place. Sketch was always a vital part of all my designs no matter the quality I was able to draw.
It's always about exploration of the available scene space and experimenting with various elements, placements, scale and details. In this case, I tried different windmill rotations in respect to the few crop fields I wanted to place there. It was important for the crops to occupy a square grids, so the resemble they harvestable goods from the games.
After I was somewhat happy with the position of the main elements, I tried to balance the composition with some secondary details like tree, foliage and then tertiary features like ground details, barrel and some flowers.
You can watch the full process video on Youtube.
