Unleaving is a hand-painted puzzle platformer that takes players into an imaginary world as if stepping into a living painting. Of course, many games within or beyond the platforming genre often showcase hand-painted art styles, whether through 2D perspectives or otherwise. However, what's curious about Unleaving's art style is how it places as much importance on its backgrounds as its foregrounds, creating a surreal world that moves with painterly, stop-motion effects.
In a recent interview with The Best War Games, developers Sura Karnawi and Saif Jabur spoke more about Unleaving's art style and stop-motion animation processes. Karnawi and Jabur also talked about some of their artistic inspirations and explained the different processes involved in creating a game that looks like a living, breathing painting.
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Unleaving's Hand-Painted Art Style And Stop-Motion Animation
Where some video game art goes full-color or in the opposite direction with black-and-white silhouette designs, Unleaving interestingly combines graphite elements with hand-painted backgrounds. It utilizes traditional painting mediums like acrylics and color palettes reflective of different emotions. Karnawi also explained how the art style they settled upon came from "a really long process of trials" and a desire "to bring to life this atmospheric world," citing paintings by renowned artists like J.M.W Turner as a source of inspiration. Karnawi and Jabur also worked with other artists on the project, including graphite artist Jayson Fuerstenberg and award-winning artist Diala Brisly, the latter creating Unleaving's characters. This includes the game's red-headed protagonist seen in trailers so far, as inspired by Tim Burton's Coraline.
Unleaving's art style also incorporates stop-motion animation techniques, which Jabur described as "painting animation." This meant creating thousands of paintings for the backgrounds, totaling 7000 scans. The developers then used an overhead scanner to capture frames and piece the paintings together, creating stop-motion effects at significant moments. Often, video games repeat assets or backgrounds for practical reasons as much as creating beautiful game experiences. However, Jabur explained that Unleaving's painting animation technique where every frame of a painting is new, meaning as players progress through the game "[...] Every background you see, you've never seen it before." Jabur spoke more about the impact of this technique and how it transforms the paintings into living, breathing art, something that looks truly special:
You have special and key moments, like the painting becomes something else. It breathes, it lives, so lots of backgrounds in the game. They're actually loops of breathing paintings, and that's the way we thought about it from the get-go: that the backgrounds are very essential to telling the emotions and the narrative.
How Unleaving's Art Style Stands Out
Karnawi added Unleaving's stop-motion animation style is also rarely found across different entertainment mediums, including movies and video games. Most video games and movies place more importance on what's happening in the foreground, with backgrounds mainly often serving to add world-building, lore, or general aesthetics of the world. Sometimes, backgrounds in movies are even blurred out of focus altogether.
However, Unleaving's artistic integration of its foreground and background creates an effect as if stepping foot into a real-life, traditional painting. That said, Unleaving doesn't seem to sacrifice its puzzle platforming elements at the expense of artistic immersion, with Karnawi describing its art and gameplay as an essential creative balance:
The art style is like yin and yang. It's a lot of work to get to that balance where it's a painting and also, at the same time, a proper puzzle platformer as well. It's like you cannot deny the one without the other.
Unleaving is currently in development.