How to create a Key Art for your game

Hi guys, my name is Steve and I'm the developer of Blue Flame, a top down shooter where you play as a pyromancer trying to restore order to the World.

Last week we released the key art for the game and I thought I'd share my thoughts with You about how to create key art for you game, but first...

What is Key Art?

To put it simply key art is a piece of art that's gonna be visible on every piece of promotional material and it's purpose is to ignite some sort of reaction in the viewer. Most of the time a game's key art is what you'll see on the store page or on it's DVD cover. In our opinion, the key art should reflect the overall feeling of the game but it shouldn't necessary be made with in-game screenshots. In fact, for most indie titles it's the wrong way to go. So how did we created our key art?

How we created the key art for Blue Flame

Because first of all a key art is supposed to invoke some kind of feeling we tried to capture what's the overall feel of Blue Flame, what's the feeling we want our players to feel while playing the game. We wanted the players to feel unique, but at the same time they are faced against great odds. This is the key theme of the game, and we tried our best for the key art to evoke similar feelings. 

The first piece of art that inspired us in the creation of the key art was Moonlighter's key art:

Notice one thing about the excellent paint drawing versus the final product: The paint version has a different creature behind the castle walls, so how come? Because the whole key art is actually just a Blender file, we can change what's behind the castle, or even in front of it, as we see fit, we can add more enemies, different enemies and our goal is that when releasing new versions of the game we slightly alter the key art, for example it will contain a different boss and not the Daeodon like it does currently.

One thing to notice when it comes to key art is that the art itself needs to have enough space for texts, such as the game's name/logo ratings and such. 

Conclusion

A game's key art is a piece of art that's gonna be used across all media platforms and it should give evoke the same feelings in the art as it's doing in the game. Feel free to use any kind of tool when creating the key art (we used Blender for a pixel art game) and make sure to get the feeling down right.

If you have the time and you're interested, you can check out Blue Flame, our action-game where you play as a pyromancer below.

Steve