Art Corner - The Creation Process Behind the Jade Empire Box Art

By Mike Sass, Senior Artist

The Jade box art was a very complicated and time consuming project. The various stakeholders in the process included the development team, our internal marketing department, our bosses, Microsoft marketing, and other external parties, such as focus groups.

It all starts with the notion that there are specific marketing concerns and that the imagery must communicate that the product has certain features. You have to establish who your audience is and try to figure out what visual cues will resonate with them. Is your game a fighting game, a story-driven game, an RPG, or a combination of these genres? Marketing will have a pre-determined message regarding these questions, which the image should positively convey to facilitate a purchasing decision.

My job began with the generation of a large number of quick pencil sketches. I arranged the game's elements in different ways to explore the communicative possibilities of these compositions. For example, a prominent face might indicate this is a story-based game; but are you then saying the game is about one specific character? Showing fighting and battles might indicate the game is action-packed, but without much depth, choice, or story. If there are characters fighting, should you show a magic effect or a weapon? Each item communicates that the game contains elements of a genre the consumer might be interested in. You want the customer to have confidence that the type of gameplay will be enjoyable to their particular tastes, so you must carefully consider what content to showcase on the cover.

In addition to these pure marketing considerations, you try to add elements of the game's art style into the designs. The Jade Empire style developed by Art Director Matt Goldman and the art team is inspired by Asian art history, in particular Han Chinese. I worked with Matt to realize the art direction while maintaining the multi faceted marketing goals of the piece. He wants it to sell as much as possible as well to allow people to have the opportunity to appreciate the great stuff inside the box.

At this point the game was still in full development, which complicated things because content might change or be cut.

After generating many idea sketches, my next step was to take five of the ideas and tighten them up a bit so they were "readable" and could be circulated around for focus testing. This set of roughs hopefully has a variety of approaches to the image so that the comparisons and comments will be valuable and point us in the right direction. These roughs were sent to the publisher, Microsoft, who then proceeded to focus test them to a sample of people. The idea here is to get a fresh "man-on-the-street" perspective to call out what the uninitiated shopper will think of this product, and what potential questions or concerns they may have, judging by the imagery. For instance, it was brought up that the metallic golems were confused with robots, which obviously would alienate someone looking for a martial arts fantasy game. The animal-based monsters were also a point of confusion; and even though all of this stuff might work great in the context of playing the game, it might have a negative effect on a potential buyer if it is shown on the box. Give people what they want, right?

With the information gathered from the focus tests, we decided on a direction. Since the game is a story-based RPG with unique mythical elements, we needed to go through the game content to find a set of creatures that would fit with the message we needed to convey. It was decided we needed to focus more on the zombie/ghost angle at the expense of some of the more interesting but potentially problematic creature designs.

My next step was to draw out a final composition based on these criteria. The image is an assemblage of many things, each trying to communicate a feature while not confusing or repelling the potential buyer. For a new franchise based on a unique story/fighting mechanic set in a non-western realm of animal monsters, golems, and unique costumes, I had my work cut out for me....

The next step was to digitally paint the image to a size that is large enough for a poster but with the clarity to also be used in the box format. I did a quick color study to figure out a way to balance all of these elements according to their importance. Again, the question arises if I can change costumes and colors for aesthetic reasons, but it's decided that we had better not manipulate what is in the game. Some decisions are made to keep continuity with other marketing images to allow for the growth of consumer awareness around specific characters. This is important with visual elements that nobody has seen for very long, as you need to build on any familiarity you might have created to this point. I then gathered reference materials by taking digital photos and posing the game models in 3DS Max.

I needed to keep the tones clean so the art has "shelf presence" and grabs the eye at a distance. I tried to keep the main figures un-obscured so they can be cut out and used for other marketing imagery, like the CD label. The real difficulty with this particular composition was arranging the figures so they have impact and balance, while existing in the same 3D space in one scene. If you go the montage route, you have the ability to scale elements out of relation to each other and manipulate their tones outside of a consistent lighting scheme. In the case of this image, it was very difficult to create contrast within the constraints of a front-lit daylight situation where the values and colors of the elements were unalterable. A simple light-on-dark solution or the reverse wasn't going to work for these particular elements. (In the set of NPC desktops I created, I used this simple and powerful formula, as those images had more flexibility and a simpler purpose.) A rule of art says that you can't have both high contrast and high chroma (color saturation) across the same area. As values get lighter or darker, their ability to be chromatically vibrant diminishes (black and white being the extreme values with the least color). High value contrasts in an image connote violence, while soft tonal transitions do the opposite. I found it a challenge to create enough contrast and impact in the image using these lighter toned elements of soft surface qualities. The image ended up being vibrant from the color contrasts, rather than any sort of simplified tonal plan. Ultimately, my goal was just to arrange everything so that the organization looked purposeful and the composition was eye-catching.

As I progressed along, things were re-evaluated and changed again. Work is trashed, and I redo much of it with armies instead of golems, assassins instead of skeletons, and so on.

As the art neared completion, I put much effort into making print tests and checking that it read well at its final size on the box. Once done, I was relieved and hoped that nothing would change in the printing stage.

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