In these forums, too much people, beginners don't have
this simple basic knowledge , or never do a level/colors design
document before doing the game.

We could make another design document tutorial ?
We could do it by theme.
I could do some basic design chapter ?

it would help if noobs actually read what you tell them. then theyd learn alot in here...

Even in George's AUM serial about game making there isn't mentioned a color design document.
Its not only the newbies, there is almost none among us who does something like that, including me.

If you wanna do a basic design chapter, that's great!

In regards to:



Doing artwork for games like this can be as exhaustive as doing photorealistic artwork, just because simple geometric forms and colors doesn't mean that the task is simple at all. Stylizing is in my oppinion a very hard job but the results can be overwhelming.

Getting a feeling for colors is maybe not suited for everyone and even though it comes with experience. If you need a shortcut, tools like kuler should be on your linklist:

http://kuler.adobe.com

i preach for years that most here should hire a solid art director. that doesnt mean you have to hire a professional but just someone who knows his stuff...

Looking back critically at my own experience, i spent too much time at making the art during the development of a game. That means i wasted so much time by refining the art... starting the game over and over...

Including the art only in the game design document would be a much better way in my mind. That means describe the style, look&feel very roughly with some sample screenshots from other games and even sketches. (In addition the whole gameplay/levels/story should be layed out there - so you can "play" the game in your mind by just reading that document.)

Then during development time i would make a prototype with just gfx placeholders, that already have the right size. Once the gameplay system is finished, so that one can play the game, i would start on working on the art part. This way you can see if the game is fun and refine it with the art and push the feeling of the game you got by playing it even further in a specific direction. This procedure also guarantees the coherence of style throughout the game.
If you decide for an art style you cant create yourself, its a good way of working together with some artist from this point on. So she/he has the freedom of creating all the assets from scratch.

The reason why so many indie games do the "art" style over the "tech" style is simply the cost in time/money for the tech style. An art game is also more congruent for an "indie" game. If an indie game has too good techie gfx, people will wonder if it really is "indie"...and worth the money.

Just my 3 cents

I think I already showed that in the off-topic topic but since it perfectly fits the topic:


I tried to adapt the Golden Sun style to 3d with dynamic lighting and all that 'modern-game' stuff.
That was really a hard piece of work and I didnt do something similiar again...making a realistic look is still easier.

@Spike: you could to try to create your textures from photo-realistic once using the Anisotropic Kuwahara Filter:


I would really like to see how that actually looks in-game when consequently used for all textures.