Diode Arena graphics rework

By Ward Dehairs, September 17, 2024

Since May of 2024 we have been looking into a government grant for the development of Diode Arena and we applied for the Flemish Audiovisual Fund.

After a lot of trial and tribulation, this grant was approved in July. The main takeaway from this process was that the graphics of Diode Arena are still sorely lacking, and we need to take the time to fully develop this aspect before continuing with a marketing campaign.

Now, 2 months later we have started this process and worked out a new style that we want to develop for Diode Arena. To pin down this style we laid out some basic arguments...

• The theme of Diode Arena is a future sports arena using remote-controlled bots, similar to real life battlebots
• Crazy non-serious and comedic contraptions shouldn't clash with the style of the game, so the art should be fairly stylized
• Futuristic glowing light elements are welcome to stick with the theme of LEDs (Diodes)
• Bots can get complex, so parts should have readable silhouettes and remain distinct
• Vibrant saturated colors are welcome, though in-game some colors code for gameplay, so these should not be used freely (blue and red for teams, green for healing)

Keeping these principles in mind, we settled on a style similar to Borderlands, we moved forward with a concept artist, Hans Krill who quickly produced some fantastic pieces for us.