CLAIRE HART - ENVIRONMENT ART FOR HIDDEN OBJECT GAME

About Pogo

Pogo is a free online casual games website launched 22 years ago. Its owner is Electronic Arts, an American video game company. Pogo offers a wide range of board, card, puzzle and hidden object games, the collection of which is constantly growing, and some of them can even be downloaded and played offline. Since 2006, Pogo.com has consistently ranked among the top 10 Internet sites for US visitors in terms of time spent on the website.

Years on the
market

50+

casual
games

15+

million monthly
visitors

10+

min average visit
duration

top Games

Claire Hart

Word Whomp

Poppit

Spades

Claire Hart: Secret in the Shadows

Claire Hart: Secret in the Shadows is a sequel to the well-known free online hidden object game Claire Hart Classic, where the player will have to join Claire again and help her figure out tangled cases. Claire's supernatural abilities allow her to sense the memories and feelings of objects around her in order to give peace to wandering spirits and unravel long-buried dark secrets. Look for the objects you need in stunningly picturesque locations: luxurious mansions, blooming gardens, huge shops and green parks. Demonstrate miracles of observation and solve secrets with Claire. The game has already become 2020's first Game of the Month on Club Pogo.

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Production Workflow

Our key task was to create new locations based on a brief from the client and hidden objects developed in accordance with the specifics and style of the location.

Claire Hart

Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures are casual games in which the player searches for hidden objects. The list of objects searched for is presented in the form of words, silhouettes and anagrams. When working with this project, we had a mega-large-scale task – drawing all 2D assets and creating all game locations. Claire Hart: Secret in the Shadows has more than 100 locations that differ in their detailed drawing and realism of the picture.

Rooms, living and working spaces, closets, dressing rooms, streets, cafes, shops, offices, warehouses – here you will find a variety of scenes filled with a huge number of assets.

The sequence of work on locations looks like this:

Approval of the idea
Location sketch
Drawing the sought-for objects.
Collection of references
Drawing the location
Adding the sought-for objects to the location
Rendering the location

Scenes are developed according to the main rule: they should not be repeated and should correspond to the setting of the game.

At the stage of collecting references, a document is drawn up in which the idea of how the future location will look like is outlined. The document contains a lot of visuals for artists and brief comments: what details are worth paying attention to, where to get inspiration from and what atmosphere to recreate.

Based on the references, the artists make several rough sketches of the future location. Then the most visually and functionally advantageous one is selected from these options. The selection is based on the assessment of the composition, angle and compliance with planning. This is followed by the elaboration of the approved option: adding details, approximate lighting and aerial perspective.

An important stage is drawing and adding objects that the player has to look for to the location. There are some nuances here. Hidden objects cannot be repeated with content that fills the scene itself. The visible part of the object must be well recognizable.

When everything is done, the locations are ready for final delivery. We provide each of them to the client for evaluation, and in the absence of comments, we finish work on the approved locations and proceed to the next ones.

Team Structure

We have been working with hidden object projects for a long time and have individual specialists who understand the specifics of such games in the best possible way. Creation of locations requires increased attention to detail and high creativity, which perfectly correlates with the capabilities of our team.

Lead 2D artist

Manages art production and delivers cutting edge visuals, successfully guiding a team of artists throughout production.

2D environment artists

Create locations and hidden objects to search in accordance with the client's request and the team lead's instructions.

Project manager

Acts as a link between the customer and the team, controlling the timing and the quality of performance.

Values Delivered

We love and know how to work with locations for hidden object games and keep players passionate about the gameplay until the last game dialogue.

Over the course of more than 2 years of working with Pogo, our team has created more than 150 locations of a wide variety of artistic orientations: living and working premises, streets, restaurants, offices, shops, warehouses, halls, and more. Despite the fact that we received certain references for the desired type of locations from the client, we were given a lot of freedom for imagination, which allowed us to add a special flavor to each of them.

Working in accordance with the plot, we implemented all the client's ideas regarding the environment in which the main character investigates her cases, thanks to which the game has been enriched with a large number of new exciting chapters and has found new admirers.