How is Artie revolutionizing mobile gaming. What makes Artie’s games unique. Why did Artie raise $35.9 million in funding. Who are some of Artie’s notable investors. What is the Artieverse. How does Artie plan to incorporate NFTs into its games.
Artie’s Groundbreaking Approach to Mobile Gaming
Artie, a Los Angeles-based gaming startup, is making waves in the mobile gaming industry with its innovative approach. The company recently raised $35.9 million in funding to develop “mobile games that hit different.” But what sets Artie apart from other gaming companies?
Artie’s unique selling point is its ability to create cross-platform mobile games that can be played instantly without the need for downloading through app stores. This groundbreaking technology allows for a seamless gaming experience, reminiscent of console-quality games but accessible directly through mobile devices.
Key Features of Artie’s Technology
- Cross-platform compatibility
- Instant play without downloads
- High-quality gaming experience
- Bypass of traditional app store restrictions
CEO Ryan Horrigan emphasized the quality of their games, stating, “We can deliver something that feels as good as a Nintendo Switch game, but it requires no hardware or app download whatsoever.” This bold claim highlights Artie’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of mobile gaming technology.
Artie’s Impressive Funding and Investor Lineup
The recent $35.9 million funding round is a testament to the potential investors see in Artie’s vision. This significant investment comes just eight months after the company announced a $10 million seed round, bringing their total funding to an impressive $45.9 million.
Who are some of the notable investors backing Artie? The company has attracted an eclectic mix of high-profile individuals and organizations, including:
- NBA star Kevin Durant
- Music industry mogul Scooter Braun
- Zynga founder Mark Pincus
- Warner Music Group
- The Winklevoss twins
This diverse group of investors brings not only financial support but also valuable industry connections and expertise to Artie’s ambitious projects.
The Mysterious Artieverse: A New Frontier in Gaming
While Artie has been relatively secretive about its ongoing projects, the company’s website and Discord server offer tantalizing glimpses into what they call the “Artieverse.” This concept appears to be Artie’s take on the increasingly popular idea of the metaverse, a shared digital space where users can interact, play, and engage with digital content.
What can we expect from the Artieverse? Based on available information, it seems to encompass:
- A series of interconnected mobile games
- Integration of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)
- Collaborations with various artists
- A diverse range of gaming experiences
Artie co-founder Armando McIntyre-Kirwin has hinted at the scope of the Artieverse, saying, “The Artieverse will contain a multitude of styles so there will be something for everyone! We have huge artist partnerships in the works to share with you soon.”
Artie’s Upcoming Games: A Sneak Peek
While much of Artie’s work remains under wraps, the company has provided some information about two upcoming titles: “Run the Table” and “Dance Battle.” These games are expected to showcase Artie’s innovative technology and incorporate NFTs into the gaming experience.
How will Artie integrate NFTs into its games? The company seems to be focusing on creating “rare digital collectibles” that players can acquire and trade within the Artieverse. This approach taps into the growing trend of blockchain-based gaming assets, potentially offering players true ownership of in-game items.
Artistic Collaborations in the Artieverse
Artie is not limiting its creative vision to just game developers. The company has announced collaborations with artists to create unique NFTs for its games. Some of the confirmed partnerships include:
- Venezuelan artist Chocotoy
- Hollywood-based illustrator Junkyard
These collaborations suggest that Artie is committed to creating visually striking and diverse content for its players, potentially attracting art enthusiasts alongside traditional gamers.
The Technology Behind Artie’s Instant-Play Games
At the heart of Artie’s innovation is its proprietary software development kit (SDK). This technology enables developers to create mobile games that can be played instantly without the need for downloads or installations.
How does Artie’s SDK work? While the company has not revealed the specifics of its technology, it likely involves a combination of cloud gaming, advanced compression techniques, and optimized code that allows games to run directly in mobile browsers or messaging apps.
The benefits of this approach are numerous:
- Reduced barrier to entry for players
- Faster distribution of games
- Potential for viral spread through social sharing
- Bypassing app store restrictions and fees
This technology could potentially disrupt the traditional mobile gaming market, offering a new paradigm for how games are distributed and played on smartphones and tablets.
The Potential Impact of Artie on the Mobile Gaming Industry
Artie’s approach to mobile gaming has the potential to significantly impact the industry in several ways:
- Challenging app store dominance: By bypassing traditional app stores, Artie could reduce the power Apple and Google hold over mobile game distribution.
- Lowering barriers for developers: The instant-play technology could make it easier for indie developers to reach audiences without navigating complex app store approval processes.
- Changing player behavior: If successful, Artie’s games could shift player expectations towards instant-access, high-quality mobile gaming experiences.
- Integrating blockchain technology: By incorporating NFTs, Artie is at the forefront of bringing blockchain technology to mainstream mobile gaming.
Is Artie poised to revolutionize mobile gaming? While it’s too early to say definitively, the company’s innovative approach and significant funding suggest that they have the potential to make a substantial impact on the industry.
Challenges and Opportunities for Artie’s Business Model
Despite the excitement surrounding Artie’s technology and vision, the company faces several challenges as it seeks to establish itself in the competitive mobile gaming market:
Potential Challenges
- Technical hurdles in delivering console-quality games without downloads
- Educating players about a new way to access mobile games
- Competing with established game developers and publishers
- Ensuring seamless integration of NFTs without alienating traditional gamers
- Maintaining game performance across a wide range of devices and network conditions
Opportunities
- Tapping into the growing interest in blockchain gaming and NFTs
- Attracting developers frustrated with traditional app store models
- Potential for rapid, viral growth through social sharing of instant-play games
- Creating new revenue streams through NFT sales and trading
- Establishing partnerships with artists and brands for unique in-game content
How will Artie navigate these challenges and capitalize on opportunities? The company’s success will likely depend on its ability to deliver on its promises of high-quality, instantly accessible games while effectively marketing its unique value proposition to both players and developers.
The Future of Gaming: Artie’s Vision and Potential
As Artie continues to develop its technology and games, the company’s vision for the future of gaming becomes clearer. The Artieverse concept suggests a interconnected ecosystem of games, digital collectibles, and social experiences that could redefine how we think about mobile entertainment.
What might the future hold for Artie and the gaming industry? Here are some possibilities:
- Seamless integration of games into social media and messaging platforms
- New forms of monetization through NFT trading and virtual economies
- Increased collaboration between game developers, artists, and brands
- A shift away from app store-centric distribution models
- More immersive and persistent mobile gaming worlds
As Artie continues to develop its products and refine its technology, the gaming industry will be watching closely. The success or failure of Artie’s approach could have far-reaching implications for how mobile games are created, distributed, and played in the years to come.
With its innovative technology, significant funding, and ambitious vision, Artie is positioning itself at the forefront of a potential revolution in mobile gaming. As the company moves forward with its plans for the Artieverse and its instantly playable, NFT-integrated games, it will be fascinating to see how this bold new approach to mobile gaming unfolds.
Artie Mobile Gaming and NFT Startup Raises $35.9 Million
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Harri Weber
Harri is dot.LA’s senior finance reporter. She previously worked for Gizmodo, Fast Company, VentureBeat and Flipboard. Find her
on Twitter and send tips on L.A. startups and venture capital to [email protected].
Artie, the Los Angeles-based gaming startup backed by NBA star Kevin Durant and Taylor Swift’s nemesis Scooter Braun, raised nearly $36 million this month to deliver “mobile games that hit different,” according to a regulatory filing made public this week.
Eight months ago, Artie revealed it was building three cross-platform titles and a software development kit (SDK) to help developers create mobile games that play automatically — without requiring a download through Apple or Google’s app stores. At the time the company also announced a $10 million seed round from Durant, Braun, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Warner Music Group, and the Winklevoss twins.
“We can deliver something that feels as good as a Nintendo Switch game, but it requires no hardware or app download whatsoever,” CEO Ryan Horrigan told GamesBeat in February. Since then, much of the firm’s work has been under wraps.
Artie declined to comment on the new funds, but it’s likely that some of its preexisting investors chipped in. Early-stage VCs and angel investors often participate in later funding rounds to retain their stakes in companies as they grow. Filings also showed Artie may be looking to raise an additional $805,900.
The three-year-old company’s psychedelic website remains sparse on details to this day, teasing “the greatest party on your phone” and “rare digital collectibles (NFTs).” But a peek at Artie’s Discord server offers a vivid look at its plans for the “Artieverse” — a name for a series of products that unmistakably taps into the hype of the metaverse (a.k.a. a giant digital or 3D space).
Posts on the server preview two titles, “Run the Table” and “Dance Battle,” as well as NFT collaborations with Venezuelan artist Chocotoy and Hollywood-based illustrator Junkyard.
“The Artieverse will contain a multitude of styles so there will be something for everyone! We have huge artist partnerships in the works to share with you soon,” said co-founder Armando McIntyre-Kirwin.
But the best look we have yet at Artie’s NFT-laden gaming experience is a teaser of Run the Table’s intro screen.
What is @theartieverse up to? The LA startup teased instantly playable, NFT-packed games. We’ve learned it’s raising a fat funding round this month, and here’s a preview of ‘Run the Table’ via discord:\n#cryptoartpic.twitter.com/izh3w3bmjl
— Harrison Weber (@Harrison Weber)
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.
la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Samson Amore
According to a Forbes report last April, both the viewership and dollars behind women’s sports at a collegiate and professional level are growing.
In 2022, the first 32 games of the NCAA tournament had record attendance levels, breaking records set back in 2004, and largely driven by the new and rapidly growing women’s NCAA tournament. WNBA openers this year saw a 21% spike in attendance, with some teams including the LA Sparks reporting triple-digit ticket sales growth, about 121% over 2022’s total. In 2023, the average size of an LA Sparks crowd swelled to 10,396 people, up from 4,701 people.
Women make up half the population, but “also 50% of the folks that are walking into the stadium at Dodger Stadium, or your NFL fans are just about 50% women,” noted Erin Storck, a panelist and senior analyst at Los Angeles-based Elysian Park Ventures.
Storck added that in heterosexual households, women generally manage most of the family’s money, giving them huge purchasing power, a potential advantage for female-run leagues.
“There’s an untapped revenue opportunity,” she noted.
In the soccer world, Los Angeles-based women’s soccer team Angel City FC has put in the work to become a household name, not just in LA County but across the nation. At an LA Tech Week panel hosted by Athlete Strategies about investing in sports, Angel City head of strategy and chief of staff Kari Fleischauer said that years before launching the women’s National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City FC was pounding the pavement letting people know about the excitement ladies soccer can bring. She noted community is key, and that fostering a sense of engagement and safety at the team’s home venue, BMO stadium (formerly Banc of California Stadium), is one reason fans keep coming back.
Adding free metro rides to BMO stadium and private rooms for nursing fans to breastfeed or fans on the spectrum to avoid sensory overload, were just some of the ways ACFC tried to include its community in the concept of its stadium, Fleischauer said.
She noted, though, that roughly 46% of Angel City fans are “straight white dudes hanging out with their bros.”
“Particularly [on] the woman’s side, I’d like to think we do a better job of making sure that there’s spaces for everyone,” Fleischauer told the audience. “One thing we realize is accessibility is a huge thing.”
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to [email protected] and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Samson Amore
At Lowercarbon Capital’s LA Tech Week event Thursday, the synergy between the region’s aerospace industry and greentech startups was clear.
The event sponsored by Lowercarbon, Climate Draft (and the defunct Silicon Valley Bank’s Climate Technology & Sustainability team) brought together a handful of local startups in Hawthorne not far from LAX, and many of the companies shared DNA with arguably the region’s most famous tech resident: SpaceX.
Here’s a look at the greentech startups that pitched during the Tech Week event, and how they think what they’re building could help solve the climate crisis.
Arbor: Based in El Segundo, this year-old startup is working to convert organic waste into energy and fresh water. At the same time, it also uses biomass carbon removal and storage to remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in an attempt to avoid further damaging the earth’s ozone layer. At the Tech Week event Thursday, Arbor CEO Brad Hartwig told a stunned crowd that Arbor aims to remove about five billion tons of organic waste from landfills and turn that into about 6 PWh, or a quarter of the global electricity need, each year. Hartwig is an alumni of SpaceX; he was a manufacturing engineer on the Crew Dragon engines from 2016-2018 and later a flight test engineer at Kitty Hawk.
Antora: Sunnyvale-based Antora Energy was founded in 2017, making it one of the oldest companies on the pitching block during the event.
Backed by investors including the National Science Foundation and Los Angeles-based Overture VC, Antora has raised roughly $57 million to date, most recently a $50 million round last February. Chief operating officer Justin Briggs said Antora’s goal is to modernize and popularize thermal energy storage using ultra-hot carbon. Massive heated carbon blocks can give off thermal energy, which Antora’s proprietary batteries then absorb and store as energy. It’s an ambitious goal, but one the world needs at scale to green its energy footprint. According to Briggs, “the biggest challenge is how can we turn back variable intermittent renewable electricity into something that’s reliable and on demand, so we can use it to provide energy to everything we need.”
Arc: Hosting the panel was Arc, an electric boating company that’s gained surprising momentum, moving from design to delivering its first e-boats in just two years of existence. Founded in 2021, the company’s already 70 employees strong and has already sold some of its first e-boats to customers willing to pay the luxury price tag, CTO Ryan Cook said Thursday.
Cook said that to meet the power needs of a battery-powered speedboat, the Arc team designed the vehicle around the battery pack with the goal of it being competitive with gas boats when compared to range and cost of gas. But on the pricing side, it’s not cheap. Arc’s flagship vessel, the Arc One is expected to cost roughly $300,000. During the panel, Cook compared the boat to being “like an early Tesla Roadster.” To date Arc Boats has raised just over $35 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kevin Durant, Will Smith and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Clarity Technology: Carbon removal startup Clarity is based in LA and was founded by Yale graduate and CEO Glen Meyerowitz last year. Clarity is working to make “gigaton solutions for gigaton problems.” Their aim? To remove up to 2,000 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere through direct air capture, a process which uses massive fans to move chemicals that capture CO2. But the challenge, Meyerowitz noted in his speech, is doing this at scale in a way that makes an actual dent in the planet’s emissions while also efficiently using the electricity needed to do so.
Meyerowitz spent nearly five years working as an engineer for SpaceX in Texas, and added he’s looking to transfer those learnings into Clarity.
Parallel Systems: Based in Downtown LA’s Arts District, this startup is building zero-emission rail vehicles that are capable of long-haul journeys otherwise done by a trucking company. The estimated $700 billion trucking industry, Parallel Systems CEO Matt Soule said, is ripe for an overhaul and could benefit from moving some of its goods off-road to electric railcars. According to Soule, Parallel’s electric battery-powered rail vehicles use 25% of the energy a semi truck uses, and at a competitive cost. Funded in part by a February 2022 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Parallel Systems has raised about $57 million to date. Its most recent venture funding round was a $49 million Series A led by Santa Monica-based VC Anthos Capital. Local VCs including Riot Ventures and Santa Monica-based Embark Ventures are also backers of Parallel.
Terra Talent: Unlike the rest of the startups pitching at the Tech Week event, Terra Talent was focused on building teams rather than technology. Founder Dolly Singh worked at SpaceX, Oculus and Citadel as a headhunter, and now runs Terra, a talent and advisory firm that helps companies recruit top talent in the greentech space. But, she said, she’s concerned that all the work these startups are doing won’t matter unless we very quickly turn around the current trendlines. “Earth will shake us off like and she will do just fine in 10,000 years,” she said. “It’s our way of living, everything we love is actually here on earth… there’s nothing I love on Mars,” adding that she’s hopeful the startups that pitched during the event will be instrumental in making sure the planet stays habitable for a little while longer.
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Artie: A New Alternative to Google and Apple
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Iapri Summerville May 8th, 2023 – 6:02 PM
Artie aims to change the mobile gaming market by utilizing an alternative approach to playing games. It wants to offer a myriad of free, high concept, quality mobile games with deep gameplay across all genres that players can access by clicking a link from a social media page instead of needing to download it.
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Horrigan started working on Artie nearly four years ago.
He wanted to give players the ability to directly play free mobile games without having to go through Google or Apple to do so. Horrigan chose this method of business after discovering how much these megacorporations charged the developers to distribute their products.
Typically, many developers tend to go along with Google and Apple because it is seen as the only way of garnering the attention of potential customers. However, this method means that developers must give up a significant amount of royalties to the companies since both take commissions from the total revenue from paid mobile games and in-app purchases. Apple, especially, has a tight grip on the situation since it is the only platform where iOS users can access applications to use on their device.
Rather than go through that process, Horrigan wanted Artie to be a hybrid between cloud gaming and mobile gaming. This business model made sure that players were able to access Artie’s mobile games without having to download them while avoiding having to cede parts of profits to Apple and Google.
Horrigan figured that since most youth spent most of their time on social media that providing a link to these games pasted on various social media pages would be the most ideal method of distribution. Furthermore, Artie can retain all rights to the games they develop specifically for the platform.
The first game featured on the platform was Pong Legends which is a mashup between fighting and pong games. Essentially, players operate anthropomorphic cartoon animals and go against each other in beer pong. The game offers various power-ups, spells, and superpowers that players collect to win the game. Ryan Horrigan designed Pong Legends to resonate with younger audiences and be social in nature, so that the game could maintain retention. The game is currently in its alpha stage, but it will soon be in beta in the near future.
However, the game is not projected to launch until later on in the year. Meanwhile, Artie is developing other games that will be available on the platform for all who use the service to play.
With the mobile gaming market being quite competitive, Artie has some other challenges to overcome in order to reach new audiences. Since the platform aims to access players directly through social media, there are plans to leverage large influencers that will direct more potential customers to their product. Further, Horrigan wants to collaborate with many third-party studios in order to scale his business once Artie is offered more opportunities to grow. Currently, the Artie team consists of fifty members with developers and artists with backgrounds from PlayStation, Activision, Electronic Arts, Zynga, and Disney.
Artie has many investors backing its development: some names include YouTube founder Chard Hurley, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Roblox Chief Product Officer Manuel Bronstein, and former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer.
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Nexters: “Graphics are secondary to gameplay. It serves the purpose of the game.” -Director
Nexters Boost Anton Kravets .
Art for Hero Wars, Nexters key project
Anton began his speech by saying that many developers who are looking for a publisher or investor are united by an uncritical attitude towards their own product. They think they made a great game and all they need to do is advance. Therefore, as a rule, they come to potential partners with a request exclusively “ about marketing “.
“ They can be understood ,” says Kravets. Still, most of the small young teams work conscientiously, they are confident in their project.
But this does not negate the fact that often in some aspects their product has flaws.
One of these shortcomings can be a wrong attitude towards the game.
Any game is a work that combines content (game design) and form (visual component). Both the first and the second can be attributed to art. However, games are not pure art, they are also business, so the form with the content must also be commercially oriented.
Therefore, it is impossible to consider a product separately, marketing separately. In game design and art, there should be aspects that work not only for the entertainment of the player, but also for their attraction and retention.
And here it is important to be able to prioritize, because another common mistake is to focus on the graphics of the game when developing.
« Graphics secondary to gameplay. She serves the purposes of the game,” Kravets insists.
Almost any game with good gameplay plays great even without graphics,” says the art director.
Therefore, during prototyping and the first stages of production, work should go exclusively using gray boxes.
If you do not follow this advice, then there are high risks that:
- at the final stages, the team will refuse to redraw all graphic legacy under a single style under the pretext “ And this is how works”;
- artists will not understand what and how to draw, because game designers will be in constant search at the prototyping stage;
- accordingly, the work of artists will often go to the wastebasket after changes in design, and the budget will skyrocket.
So everything that can change in the project is not worth drawing “ to final “. Moreover, even concepts must solve specific problems. Otherwise, it risks turning into wasted time and effort.
The third popular mistake that developers make is the existence of a contradiction between form and content (ludonarrative dissonance). This is not only found in console action games, where good, according to the plot, guys kill thousands of opponents.
Dissonance is also common in casual games.
As an example, Anton gives a game in which the main character, an archaeologist, searches for her missing father according to the scenario. However, the gameplay is not about finding a parent or the keys that can lead to it, but about building an ancient city.
Such games can captivate with their mechanics, but they will never be trusted by the user. This can affect both retention and, in general, audience loyalty to the project. It is important for the player to understand (if there is a narrative) why he is doing this particular thing and not something else.
Best Art Design in Games 2020 – DTF Games
The beauty of virtual worlds.
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The generation of consoles has already changed – but no technological leap has changed the fact that the work of artists is especially important for a beautiful picture in the game. So it’s time to honor the games with the most original and cool visual design this year.
Luckily, there were a lot of them.
Creaks
In the past, Amanita Design created Machinarium and Samorost 3, some of the most beautiful and cozy adventure games in the history of the genre. Creaks, the studio’s new game, has veered away from point’n’click and into platformers. There are also many nasty ways to die, which is new for Amanita Design projects. But the signature style of the studio is still felt here.
Creaks is just incredibly detailed: you can see that every detail in it was painted by hand, like in Machinarium. It was often said in the studio that they were again inspired by illustrations from old Czech books, and therefore every drawing in the game has a lot of strokes and some deliberate carelessness. This gives the picture more charming texture.
Although the huge underground mansion that the protagonist travels through looks generally cozy, it is still a dark place where mechanical monsters live and statues sometimes laugh.
But as soon as the light is turned on, the monsters turn into furniture. Like a fleeting horror in the dark, caused by pareidolia, when for a second you take a hanger for a scary person. And so that there was not so much light, the developers chose the style of the beginning of the 20th century, when electric lighting was just coming into use.
Radim Yurda, head of development, said that when designing the style of an amazing mansion and its no less strange inhabitants, Amanita Design artists were inspired by two things.
First of all, the authors recalled the cubic architecture of Josef Gočár. In particular, his staircases and furniture – their irregular shapes themselves set a surreal atmosphere. Similar forms in Creaks set the mood of restless sleep quite well.
Jurda, together with his team, perfectly remembered the works of Jiri Bart, who taught many Czech artists. And in particular, everyone sunk into the memory of his puppet cartoon “Pied Piper”. So it was natural for Amanita Design to borrow some of the grotesque and expressive spirit of Bartha’s work to create an underground world that lives by bizarre rules.
As one bright touch, the studio filled the mansion with groovy baroque paintings that showed different scenes. It seems to be a trifle that you can skip, but still gives the world volume and interest. Where else have you seen a game where there is a fighting game that you need to start with a key?
Cyberpunk 2077
One can argue endlessly about Cyberpunk 2077’s gameplay, but what shouldn’t be questioned is just what a stunning job the artists have done to visualize the big city of an outdated future. When you first go out into the streets of Night City, your eyes just run wide. You don’t know what to pay attention to first of all – you don’t often see such elaborate futuristic megacities even outside of video games.
Night City is simultaneously reminiscent of Los Angeles from Blade Runner and its sequel, cities from other old fiction and real-life metropolitan areas of the 80s and 90s. And the creator of the original role-playing game, Mike Podsmith, said that when designing Night City, he was inspired by the city from SimCity, which he deliberately made a bad place to live.
Cyberpunk 2077 is filled with all the familiar gloomy concrete high-rise buildings and huge skyscrapers of the most bizarre shape. When you arrive in the city center, its megastructures hang over you and crush you with their power. You rarely even see the sky there.
At the same time, even the smallest graffiti looks like something that could exist in reality. There are just so many of them and they look exactly the way you would expect from a metropolis with an off-scale crime rate – like, for example, in New York in the 80s. The styles of many inscriptions and drawings even differ from each other in different areas.
Like a city from a cyberpunk future, it is full of neon signs and advertising – it is insanely many and diverse. It can be used to study the culture of Night City: you can see how corporations in this world are ready to sell anything to anyone in any way they want. Acid-bright images, nudity, dismemberment, drugs – for the advertisers of 2077 there are no taboo topics.
Then you pay attention to the people wandering the streets of this multi-layered anthill. And they are dressed differently. The poor on the outskirts wear very cheap and practical clothes without any decorations. In the city, flashy bright things are preferred, reminiscent of the American 80s and Russian 90s.
The wealthy added even more kitsch and surrounded themselves with ultra-expensive jewelry and materials, as if made from the skins of extinct animals. And a strict corporate culture has encouraged all corporations to wear minimalistic and militarized black business attire and uniforms.
Precisely the same fashion has shaped the interiors and auto style of Night City. You will never confuse the bulky cheap coffin cars of street thugs with the streamlined luxury cars of the elite.
It seems that the year 2000 never came in this world, which is why the style of the end of the 20th century was infused and mutated into something truly crazy. A mercenary in a gas mask and a samurai helmet, who walks around in a bright puffed-up jacket and police pants – in Night City this is in the order of things.
But still, cyber implants are much more striking in people. They, like clothes, can say a lot about the owner.
Small implants are usually masked, they are given out only by small lines of interface between artificial skin and real. But the more complex and powerful the gadgets, the more they resemble expensive prostheses from the same Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But a cheap implant is noticeable from a kilometer away: you can instantly distinguish the cybernetic hand of a homeless person from the augmented hand of a corporation fighter.
But the cyberpsychopaths of the Maelstrom gang excelled most of all. They are obsessed with cyber-implants, so they do not try to disguise or ennoble their improvements in any way. Usually half of their face is replaced by a jumble of electronics glowing an ominously red light. They are definitely one of the most memorable cyborgs in games in recent years.
Hades
Although the style of Hades was already mentioned in the results of 2018, after all, its full-fledged release took place only this year.
So let’s once again admire the talent of the artists from Supergiant Games.
Studio Games surprise every time with colorful isometric style. Even the realm of the dead in Hades, where you spend the entire game, is striking in its brightness.
There is not a single detail in the game that would be poorly rendered: everything from the landscapes of the underworld to the portrait of the most minor character is beautiful. Even the three-dimensionality of the characters against the background of 2D backgrounds is not striking.
But still, the main achievement of Supergiant Games is that she was able to adapt her style to the rogue-light format. Random generation could easily spoil the aesthetics of locations or turn them into something gameplay-boring. But the developers managed to get around all these problems and combine the element of randomness with hand-drawn isometrics.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Ori and the Blind Forest is one of the most beautiful metroidvanias in history.
For the sequel to be on the list of games with the best art direction, it was enough to simply repeat the same style. But the authors went further.
The first part was 2D, but the continuation is already done in 3D. And the game has not lost at all from this, on the contrary: the world is still fascinating, but now what is happening on the screen looks much larger, there are much more details.
At the same time, the world of Will of the Wisps is brighter, and more diverse views are passing in front of the player. It’s just that if in the past the developers showed a decadent forest, now we see a place where only recently something went wrong.
Ghost of Tsushima
The gameplay in Ghost of Tsushima is not so much new, and technologically the graphics are often lame. But the game has such a powerful design that for many it will surely be the main release for the PlayStation in the past year.
The creators were inspired by the films of Akira Kurosawa and set themselves the task of creating the ultimate samurai action movie.
And every detail in the game works for this idea.
Visually there is nothing superfluous in the interface. The direction is dictated by the wind. Quest markers rarely appear. And the indicators are displayed only as needed. Nothing distracts from the environment.
For greater aesthetics, the authors, in fact, completely transferred the island of Tsushima into the game. In their version, this place was filled to the brim with all the most poetic things that could be seen in the era of the samurai. And thanks to the particle effect, even an ordinary autumn forest turns into a fabulous place.
Ghost of Tsushima is even more reminiscent of Kurosawa’s films in a special black and white mode. Only because of him you may want to go through the game a second time.
Paper Mario: The Origami King
The Paper Mario series has been using paper stylization to its fullest since its inception. But in Paper Mario: The Origami King, this approach has reached new heights, if only because the intimacy of locations is not so strongly felt here.
But the main achievement of artists is that they again made a world where almost everything is made of paper, cardboard and papier-mâché. You never cease to be amazed at how the developers came up with new ways to emphasize the “paperiness” of the world. Either from the hammer, the obstacles crumble into confetti, or the sticker characters fold and unfold.
The most adorable new idea for The Origami King is origami itself. The fact is that some of the characters and all the enemies in the game are not just flat stickers with drawings, as it was before, but full-fledged origami figures.
Large origami bosses look especially impressive. I just want to find somewhere instructions on how to fold them out of paper yourself.
Shady Part of Me
There are not so few games about how a character travels on a two-dimensional plane in a three-dimensional world. Such moments were episodic even in Super Mario Odyssey and did not surprise anyone there.
And at the end of 2020, when no one was waiting, suddenly a game came out that does everything possible with this concept.
Even if we leave aside how much the authors have thought through the gameplay interaction of the girl and her shadow, Shady Part of Me looks incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Not only can the world of shadows, generated mainly by shadows from three-dimensional objects, simply be uninteresting, but the developers have wrapped this idea in an even more intriguing shell.
And the fact is that the three-dimensional world of the game looks drawn on paper, which symbolizes its isolation from reality. All colors are like watercolors. Everywhere shading, typical, for example, for old illustrations. The sounds of footsteps are even accompanied by characteristic comic strips.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
The developers at Vanillaware used to release games in vibrant fantasy settings. Therefore, when they started making a video game that takes place mostly in the recent past and the not-so-distant future of our world, which is full of gray concrete and nondescript brick buildings, the artists of the studio had to somehow contrive to give the picture liveliness.
And the main technique that helped to cope with this is work with light. All graphics outside of the battles are two-dimensional, and therefore the authors were able to fully deploy with visual effects in order to choose for each scene exactly the lighting that looks the most interesting.
There are especially many rays of the rising or setting sun in the game. This made it possible to emphasize the theme of nostalgia, which is especially important for the story of time travel.
But this technique wouldn’t delight so much if it weren’t for the superbly drawn backdrops and characters. Each landscape is a picture, and sometimes what is happening in the game does resemble a full-length anime in the original style.
DOOM Eternal
Doom in 2016 was science fiction, where a significant part of the game took place in the corridors of laboratories, and everything that happened was trying to give at least some scientific explanation. Eternal, on the other hand, has transformed into a space fantasy with flying stone fortresses in space and what can essentially be called magic.
The question of which option is better is open. But the approach from Eternal clearly gave the artists more freedom. Moreover, the very topic of the demonic invasion of Earth pushed for a larger epic.
As a result, DOOM Eternal is filled with landscapes that seem to have descended from the covers of metal albums. Shattered skyscrapers from which rivers of lava flow. A giant horned demon chained to a rock against the backdrop of a titanic gothic infernal temple. Fragments of Phobos flying around Mars, to the core of which a hefty hole was pierced. The city of the ancient spiritualized civilization of warriors. Giant torture chambers, where souls are literally squeezed out of people. In general, the visual of DOOM Eternal with might and main works according to the rule of steepness. And it’s wonderful!
Spiritfarer
Spiritfarer wants to be called the most beautiful cartoon of the year, which was shown from just one angle and at some point turned into a video game.
It simultaneously resembles landscapes by Hiroshi Yoshida, cartoons by Miazaki and Tomm Moore, and Gris with Supergiant Games. Such a light style to play with a relaxed soothing tone is just right.
In general, just look at the screenshots to understand: Spiritfarer has given us some of the cutest characters and the most beautiful scenery of 2020.
Hylics 2
Projects by the artist Mason Lindroth are truly original. With the exception of the musician who helped him with the soundtracks, he made all his games alone. And, as you would expect from such projects, the visual created by Lindroth is unique: if you do not take into account his small projects, this style is found only in the first and second Hylics.
Almost all the graphics in them are photographs of plasticine handicrafts, colored on a computer. But, unlike any Neverhood, the images in Hylics are much more subtly psychedelic.
Hylics is a chaotic absurdism with acidic bright colors, where the familiar elements of a fantasy adventure have been distorted almost beyond recognition.
This is a spectacle like no other, which fascinates with its unusualness.
As if Jean Arpa, together with Salvador Dali, tried to make a cartoon based on Carroll’s Jabberwock. And even then such a description is less eloquent than shots from the game itself.
The second part noticeably improved everything that was in the original. It is immediately noticeable how the color and clarity in the picture have increased. And yes, there are more animations. Now enemies squirm in the most unimaginable ways – it’s much more spectacular than if they just stood still in place.
Kentucky Route Zero
Kentucky Route Zero is an episodic game that started coming out back in 2013 and managed to influence many developers (the same authors of Disco Elysium, for example). But since the final episode finally came out in 2020, it would be a sin not to tell about her style now.
It is minimalistic, like in Another World. The characters on the faces do not have any details, except that you can see glasses or a beard.
