Exploring Sunnyside's Visual Style: 3D Modelling and Hand-Painted Textures

The art style for my game was heavily influenced by TV shows created by Genndy Tartakovsky such as Dexter’s Lab, Samurai Jack, and Primal, and Toys for Bob games such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. All of these share commonalities in their stylisation, strong silhouettes and striking shape language, with Tartakovsky’s shows also pushing interesting, unconventional colour palettes.

Having our protagonist as a chicken was actually super helpful for this achieving this look because they’re big, round, bulky, and white. With the eggs also being a very light, desaturated colour, it left tons of room for loud, colourful environments.

It doesn’t take much knowledge of art to know that you rarely use solid black or white, and whether you’re picking something really dark or really light, it should have some colour to it. Being a mad scientists evil lab, I wanted to add cold tones to my colours, rather than warm ones in order to help the overall mood of the game. I also figure that as the player progress, the tones could subtly shift warmer, creating that sense of progression and hope as they get closer. What I did find however, was that making the colours too cold, made everything look a bit depressing. I had already considered the idea of making the walls purple, as I like often like to put purple hues into my darks and lights anyway as I like the way it looks, but its also seen fairly frequently for metal textures in cartoons, Dexters Lab and Crash Bandicoot being prime examples. I also like that purple kind of fits into that spectrum of could be a cold or a warm colour, which I think subconsciously works for a cold feeling environment, whilst not making the overall environment look too bleak.

Another thing that works great with this, is the complimentary yellow and lime green colours. You don’t need the animated Joker in a Lakers jersey holding a buzz lightyear to see how well these colours can harmonise! Since we want warning signs and lights, yellow works great. And the lime green will come in really handy when we have pipes filled with toxic waste all over the place!