Propaganda ‘posters’ are pieces of 2D art that will be displayed electronically on signs and billboards throughout This Game is About Robots. These are used as critical pieces of environmental storytelling to explicitly provide information to the player, hinting at larger pieces of lore. Keep in mind that these graphics will be displayed on electronic billboards or monitors and may have effects such as scanlines applied to them through an animated texture, so that may potentially affect the way you think about color.
This poster should depict a utopian exaggeration of the city of Cog Springs, appearing shiny and spotless.
The blockout of Cog Springs is still in progress, but below are some images of what we have right now, so you can get a sense of the visual identity of the city.
‘Going Haywire’ is a fake virus that the dictator of Cog Springs invented to scare robots into endless productivity. This poster should be an image of a robot sitting on a bench relaxing, which is one of the many signs of going haywire.
Somewhere on the poster, there should be a sign or text box that reads:
<aside> 🚨
Learn to Spot The Signs:
Not doing your job Wearing unauthorized paint colors Helping other robots Dissenting to authority Not complying with reality as is described to you
</aside>
The robot pictured on the bench should be a new robot that is not seen anywhere else in the game, which is intended to make the breadth of robot-kind feel wider than we have time to model, rig, animate etc. Below is a reference of all the robots that are currently in the game, so you can get a sense of the visual style we have for the characters. In general, the robot should have a clear purpose that it was designed to do, but it’s up to you what that is. Maybe it’s a chef robot with spatulas for hands. Maybe it’s a fishing robot who has fishing rods mounted to its shoulders. Whatever you think would be cool or funny is great, just run with it!
This is a bit of a more aggressive poster, but I’m not really super set on what this one looks like. Maybe the text takes up the majority of the background, and there is a silhouette of a robot pointing as like an ‘uncle sam’ riff? If you come up with something better or just have any other ideas, feel free to run with it.
This one needs to be like super creepy. This actual image will only appear within the boneyard itself, which is the secret underground power plant that runs off of human bones, powering all of cog springs.
The Boneyard is in very early development, but below is a moodboard of what we plan to make the environment look like. I think a good direction for this poster could be an environment that looks like this, with the text ‘there is no boneyard’ littered across the entire artwork. For this one, it would be great to have the text exported as a separate layer, so we can animate the text to blink or something in the actual texture.
