Hi, I've got a design for a side scrolling 2.5D horror game that I want to start working on.
Unfortunately I am not a strong enough artist nor is MED strong enough for me to make realistic looking artwork.
Can anyone think of a good style that I can use that will be doable but not ruin the creepy atmosphere?

A game with a really good athmosphere was Lone Survivor. I haven't played it completly because i'm not horror fan, but it's really athmospheric.
Screenshot

Another style was LIMBO with just black and white and some shades of gray.
It was really creepy because you couldn't see anything or recognize its colors.
Screenshot

The Cave wasn't a horror game, but you could adopt its style to a horror athmosphere.
[ulr=http://www.ingame.de/files/2013/01/The-Cave-Screenshot-02.jpg]Screenshot[/url]

Just some styles that could be used.
3run also made a cool horror game demo with a really lowres rendering (he used the pixelation shader from the wiki). Maybe you could look into this as well

I agree those are nice aesthetics that work for horror games, but other than the cave those are all 2D.
I can't do a shadow style or a pixelated style because I'm using 3D models.
I agree the cave looked nice but I don't think the cartooney style would keep the atmosphere.
Thanks for the suggestions though.

The 2.5d game DeadLight...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QJbIp-EVKXI


OfficialPage

Woah...that is some kind of awesomeness of a 2D game Malice....

I got a cool indie 2d called Mark of the Ninja from Steam and it recommended DeadLight to me as the are both high rated and published by Microsoft indie outreach.

Yeah I was thinking about Deadlight, I think I'll just try my best for the character models
and then make all the textures B&W or use a grey scale of some kind.
Thanks for the input, hopefully it'll look okay

Maybe it 's just me but I've always thought of this kinda things as the paint job after all the body work [carshop metaphor].
Anyways I like a pipeline of -

1)building the code frame work
2)build levels and environment code
3)level lighting
4) build simple meshes and character code
5) then level textures
6) build detail meshes and character textures
7) then effects (with code)
8) and finish with gui/hud.

This lends to team work but will also help from putting the cart before the horse. I'm not saying your doing anything wrong. Just how many times have I started one project only to have it morph into something else? (especial when work for a beginning designer), anyways I think you could make the years scariest game using the super Mario world and meshes.

That's probably a good pipeline, but I personally like to have models to work with, so I'll make my main character models and program the core mechanics into them. So I do character models before levels. Also I'm one programming student with little experience trying to start a portfolio.
You could be right that that pipeline lends to teamwork nicely but since I'm working alone I don't think I have to worry about teamwork just yet.
Thanks for the advice though I'll take all that I can get.
(Also don't worry 90% of my designs end up different than I originally intended, you're not alone)

Not for you rtsgame706 -
But for any beginners that buy a copy of the engine with dreams of the " fast track plan to creating pro level game in 1 week" in their head.

I did forget something that I think so many people don't even try on. Design and I don't mean a simple idea but a fully laid out paper walk through of the app. Heaven knows I learned long ago just to walk away from programming work when the design amounts to 2-3 short paragraphs. The longer you spend laying out the design the better you will be (1 week is not long, try 3 months). Of course design should reflect project scale. I even did paper designs for all the programming learning experiments I did. Don't get me wrong I am a lazy lousy designer.

*Biggest hobby pet-peeve - the design(and redesign) on the fly designers, it's sort of someone saying they have no real idea what they want but you have to create no matter how many time you reinvent the wheel on every small piece of code.