Creating a mood board for a video game can be a great way to brainstorm ideas and explore the visual elements of your project. Visualizing different aspects such as color palette, typefaces, or even character designs can help bring your project to life and provide further inspiration.
A mood board is also an excellent tool for developing a consistent style throughout the game. In this blog post, we’ll explain how you can create a powerful mood board that captures the feel of your game.
How to Make a Video Game Mood Board
Benefits of a video game mood board
A mood board is essentially an arrangement of visuals that helps set the tone or atmosphere of any given project. Learn more about how to make a mood board. In the case of video games, this means collecting images, artwork, words, and anything else that evokes the desired feeling or emotion you want to convey in your game.
The design components of a video game include the story, characters, visuals (art, animation and sound), user interface, levels, gameplay mechanics and overall feel.
The art style, animation and sound effects all play an essential role in creating a visually appealing game that captures the player’s imagination. User interface design is also integral to creating an enjoyable gaming experience. Level design helps create exciting scenarios for players to explore while satisfying gameplay mechanics is crucial for engaging gamers.
Elden Ring Video Game Design
Finally, the overall feel of the game will be determined by a combination of all these elements working together harmoniously. To achieve this cohesive design balance, a video game mood board can be an incredibly useful tool. It can help you organzie your thoughts, workshop design aspects, and share your concepts with your team.
For example, if you’re creating a horror-themed game, you might include some dark visuals such as shadows or foggy landscapes in your mood board. The idea is that by having all these elements in one place, it will give you some creative inspiration for how to design your game.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into each component.
Mood Board Gaming Elements
World
Creating a believable and compelling game world is one of the most important design aspects of any video game. From developing engaging characters to building an immersive environment, each element needs to be crafted with care in order to create a captivating playing experience.
The setting of your game’s world is particularly important, as environments have the potential to shape a player's reactions and emotions. For example, a dark, looming castle overlook would inspire awe and mystery, while an open field of wildflowers might conjure feelings of joy and wonderment. It’s important to include visuals of this in your video game mood board.
Red Dead Redemption 2 • Mood board gaming inspiration
Additionally, game worlds that offer different types of interactive elements can make them even more exciting — think trees to climb, hidden gems or secret passageways. Creating an interesting game world full of interesting surprises will help make sure your players stay engaged.
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Creating a Mood Board Gaming Project
Characters
Crafting believable and engaging characters is a major component of video game design. In order for a player to truly connect with the world of the game, it is essential to create memorable characters with distinct personalities, motivations, and backstories that makes them feel real.
A good way to design your characters is through visual style — interesting costume designs, unique hairstyles, or physical features such as tattoos can bring out important narrative elements. If there are specific character design components that you have envisioned, be sure to include these details through the visuals in your video game mood board.
The Last of Us • Mood board gaming inspiration
Additionally, their dialogue should feel natural within the context of their setting while also conveying personality traits that make them feel alive. Finally, if possible, creating interactions between different characters can be a great way to add depth and complexity to your game world.
Artwork for Mood Board Gaming
Artwork
Artwork design is an important element of any video game, as it helps players to experience the world around them and understand its underlying story. Careful consideration should go into selecting art styles that accurately reflect different worlds and characters.
There are a variety of artwork styles used in video games, from the classic pixel art to more realistic 3D models. Pixel art can provide a nostalgic, retro vibe to your game's visuals while 3D models often look more modern and lifelike. Vector art strikes a balance between pixel art and 3D models by providing clean lines and artistic expressions as well as textures for more detailed effects.
Nintendo Video Games • Mood board gamin inspriation
Other artwork styles such as cel-shading can also be used to create an anime-inspired look, while hand-drawn illustrations can give your game a unique charm. Ultimately, choosing the right artwork style for your game depends on its setting and themes.
Additionally, artwork style can have a dramatic impact on the tone of your game — cartoony visuals may portray a lighter atmosphere while harsher lines might hint at something more sinister lurking underneath. By leveraging artwork strategically, you can help to bring your vision to life.
Mood Board Gamin Tutorial
Assemble the mood board
Once you’ve gathered an apt amount of materials for your video game mood board, it’s time to assemble. Considering this is for a video game, it’s best to use a digital mood board software. To create our own example of a video game mood board, we used StudioBinder’s mood boarding app.
Check it out in the link below.
Video Game Mood Board Example
Creating a digital mood board for your video game can be incredibly helpful in keeping the project organized and on track. By collecting images, screenshots, videos, and other media in a single location, you'll be able to quickly compare different art styles and make better decisions.
Using a mood board also gives you flexibility when selecting artwork — you can easily see what works best together and where there is room for improvement. This can allow you to spot any inconsistencies in your game’s design that could hurt the overall experience of players before it's too late.
Furthermore, having a digitized mood board makes it easier to collaborate with others on designing the perfect visuals for your game. Hopefully this article will help you create your own video game mood board so you can tackle the creating of your video game with confidence.
Up Next
How to Make a Film Mood Board?
Another medium that utilizes storytelling through characters and a story’s world is cinema. Films can provide great inspiration for design video games. To learn more about what goes into film mood boards for possible design inspiration, check out our next article.
Up Next: Film Mood Boards →
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