Clark Street Studios
World Without Color is a creative work which began alongside the inception of Clark Street Studios in 2021. While the project was initially conceived as an isometric 2.5D platformer, World Without Color expanded into a world of its own for expressing creative musings and learning technical processes. The ongoing exploration of World Without Color- as an idea, space, and story- has resulted in various game demos, animations, art pieces, and more. This page serves to display, explain, and offer commentary on the creations found from venturing into a World Without Color.
World Without Color started as a game made in Unity. Inspired by games like Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, World Without Color sought to capture a feeling of a journey in a faux 3D environment. The journey in question was about the main character, Red, as he traveled north, back through the hometown of his past, and up through the mountain range surrounding the village. A key aspect of the game's aesthetic is captured in the use of only black or white as a palette. All artwork for the game was created adhering to this principle. To convey depth in a literal sense, outlines were essential to capture a proper sense of distance and layering.
Conforming to this aesthetic, sprites and art assets were created using vector graphics for the simplicity of strokes and fills. Animations in the game were created frame by frame (15fps) and usually involved rotoscoping of a 3D model. While this process resulted in a unique aesthetic, it was largely time consuming and unscalable. For example, the 8-directional run cycle displayed above took about 40 hours to complete.
Due to both inflexibility of technical systems and inexperience, development of World Without Color as a game is more or less on indefinite hiatus as of version 0.3.1. Despite this, the processes first explored to create the foundation of the game's aesthetic resulted in the creation of a larger universe for the project. For example, the below trailers for the game represent forays into a more artistic context for World Without Color:
The transition of World Without Color from a game into a more general artistic project is mainly evident in 3D animations set within the world of World Without Color. Many of the animations depict nonlinear interpretations of specific scenes within the overarching narrative of World Without Color. Red's rig, which is used in these animations, has gone through several iterations and improvements, both in pursuit of topological optimzation but also more emotional expression. Below is a demonstration of an older version of the rig, as well as a short animation using the latest version:
Red is used as a vehicle both to display the literal world around him, but also to explore some of the concepts behind the game, like aloneness and persistence. Eventually, the goal is to create an animated short film or episodic series telling the entire story of World Without Color. That, or the release of the game, which would also tell the story. Or maybe both.
The more recent animations, rigs, etc., for World Without Color are of a noticeably lower graphical fidelity than earlier renditions. This is in an attempt to capture an aesthetic similar to PS1 era games like Ape Escape. With more constraints- fewer polygons, lower texture and render resolution- careful and intentional design decisions need to be made to convey the same level of information. For example, text needs to be thoughtfully written to accommodate a low render resolution. These limitations are not imposed purely for a challenge, however. Instead, the restrictions create a world that is overtly unreal yet atmospheric all the same. The dissonance between a simulated world and the mimesis of real phenomena like snow, conversation, and dreams, aim to evoke empathy and intrigue for this space.
Other products of World Without Color are the tangential assets required for displaying a world. For example, the font seen across this website is a custom-made font named "Colorless" for use in menus, subtitles, promotional material, and so on.
Another example of a tangential product is a small HLSL shader written to expedite the animation process of emulating the characteristic outlines of World Without Color (and reduce poly count by 3 times). Before this shader was written, outlines were manually created in a somewhat contrived process. Above is a demonstration of this shader.
All music used throughout the project was created by artist D514.