Smoothing Out the Rough Edges of Art Direction
Three months in, the look-and-feel started fragmenting. Here's how we pulled it back.
Around month three the art direction started doing that thing where every screen looks like it belongs to a slightly different game.
The culprit wasn't any single artist — it was that we had pinned references but never written down the rules derived from those references. Light direction, palette tension, where the eye should land first.
Codifying those into a one-page brief stopped about 80% of the drift overnight.