Deep Dive: How to achieve the cozy papercraft style of Paper Cut Mansion
Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.
Earlier installments cover topics such as how art director Olivier Latouche reimagined the art direction of Foundation, how the developer of the RPG Roadwardendesigned its narrative for impact and variance, and recreating the the real-life diorama-based experience with the art of LEGO Bricktales.
In this edition, Gabriele Caruso, creative director at Space Lizard Studio, gives us a detailed walkthrough of how the papercraft-based aesthetic of Paper Cut Mansion came together with what he calls the Reverse UV method.
I’m Gabriele Caruso, creative director at Space Lizard Studio, a three-man team behind Paper Cut Mansion, a roguelite where you enter a strange and spooky mansion and work to uncover its secrets. What makes Paper Cut Mansion incredibly unique is its papercraft art style. Every character, every environment, and even the menus are hand drawn with real pencils on real paper, then transcribed into the game engine and brought to life.
The process starts with a pencil sketch that defines the shapes of the cutout paper models, but this sketch is not thrown away. Instead, it’s enhanced with more details, a face, two arms, a torso, two legs, some shading, and so on.
The drawing is complete once the paper model has all its parts defined, including the lines and edges where it folds and the tags where the body parts are supposed to be glued together as if it was going to become a real papercraft model. The artist then scans the sheet of paper and imports it into Photoshop to
Read more on gamedeveloper.com
