Making a cake house for dessert themed games- Part II

This is part II of the posts. There’re lots of such Match-3, bubble shooter, and puzzle games in App store, with dessert theme for game graphics. In this article, I share the workflow of making an isometric cake house.

Junxue Li, Blogger

January 5, 2015

3 Min Read

It’s quite popular to use dessert theme for game graphics recently, you can find lots of such Match-3, bubble shooter, and puzzle games in App store, which have ginger bread houses and whipped cream trees. For female players like them and lots of people like sweet food (me too).

Our team makes art works for a few such games. In this article, I share the workflow of making an isometric cake house. For at current stage, our clients don’t allow us to disclose the in-game pictures. That the pictures in this article are demo art works made by us, for this little tutorial.

The blog posts have two parts, for the making of two different cake houses.

Click here to see Part I of the posts.

Step 1: Finding photo references

Most of our works are inspired by real world architectures and desserts, here are the reference photos we find for this demo work.

For desserts and materials: These are important guides for depicting the feeling of the food

Step 2: Concept sketch

Block out the rough 3D form, combine the round dome with the whipped cream, and enrich the design by adding some small things. And of course the perspective should match the game definition.

Step 3: Finer line art

In this step we make the forms more defined. Add the cherry and small windows to give the design more life. The line art should have good sense of spacial form, and structure. And the soft & hardness of materials should be dealt with.

Step 4: Color design

The main colors are the white of the cream cake and red of the jam, in addition to these, we make the whipped cream green and the cherry more intense red, that the color palette have strong contrast, making the cake look lovely and appetizing .

Step 5: Further polishing

Assign the main light, give basic shading. Start to build the feeling of different food. For example, the shape of the frosting, the delicacy of the cherry, the stickiness of the jam, the softness of the cake.