The Art of Meerkats
Hi everyone! Luckily the weather has not been too nice here in northern Finland lately, for we are very busy with Lead the Meerkats at the moment. Still, there’s always enough time to share something from the ever-facinating development process of the game to you guys and girls.
This time, we want to share something from Lead the Meerkats’ art style. How to turn an animal into an interesting character? How can you create a family-friendly game taking place in Africa without making it resemble too much Lion King? The game’s lead artist Arto Mikkola is going to share some of his insight on these matters.
Hi Arto! I’m sorry to drag you back to reality from those beautiful images of sunny Africa, but I have a few questions regarding the Lead the Meerkats’ art style.
Hi Olli! I’ve been staring my display/books/sketchpad for 6 months so this small break is most welcome 
How do you find Africa as a setting? What kind of challenges did it create when designing the visual look for the game?
Well, the starting point wasn’t ideal for this game because it was -25 degrees of celcius outside and snow was piling against the windows of our office. It takes a lot of effort to get your mind to switch to almost opposite settings. Best thing to do this is to avoid looking outside and keep the heat at maximum. I also found out that watching lots of documentaries of Africa (even if they didn’t include Meerkats), browsing holiday brochures and playing bongos helped. After a few days I had my mind set “below the equator” and everything was a lot smoother ride from there on.
Designing the visual look for a Continent you barely know can be quite challenging. I decided early on that the visual look for this game doesn’t need to be as truthful as you see in postcards or nature documents on TV. I wanted Lead the Meerkats Africa to be more fantasy interpretation from the real thing. The technical limitations for this game also helped to make this decision because we didn’t have means to realize complex biome of African Savannah.
One of the funny things that came across during production was that African symbols and colors have lot of similarities with Mexican and Native American symbols and colors. In the end there is a fine line when something changes from being African to being Native American. When I was designing main UI elements, I found this out the hard way when, I asked our Game Designer Jukka what he thinks of my work on the UI so far. The reply was “I didn’t know we were making a game about Mexicans and Indians”. After that I didn’t use lime green anymore.
The game will have a bunch of different kinds of animals. Can you tell us a little bit about them?
Yeah, the game has lots of different animals that are either friends, enemies or hmm…well… breakfast. In the end we tried to avoid too cartoonish style so that the visuals would feel more like a TV documentary than Lion King. We tried to emphasize the characteristics of each animal so in the end the enemies look a bit more evil than they do in real world. I also wanted the cute meerkats to have more bravado than in real life so they ended up looking more Errol Flynnish than Elijah Woodish, if you know what I mean.
Lead the Meerkats has some really beautiful cutscenes with very strong storybook-esque vibe. Where did the inspiration for these images came from?
At the beginning of the project I did some research on Africa and African art to get inspiration and references for the whole game. By accident I came across a site about modern African art. In that website I found a painting that really caught my eye. It was a painting by Mwamedi Chiwaya and the art style was called TingaTinga. It had a really nice traditional feel to it. I started to explore more about TingaTinga and found out that it is a modern art movement started in 60’s in Tanzania. So you could say that the main inspiration for the cutscenes comes from TingaTinga.
Finally could you tell our readers how one can gain such jedi drawing skills that you have?
Sorry, I’m a Sith.