What is Video Game Concept Art?
What makes a video game truly unforgettable? While gameplay, story, and competition are important, one of the most defining elements is the game's art style. From lush landscapes to neon-lit cities and apocalyptic wastelands, video game art shapes the player’s experience, creating the world they’ll explore. Before these immersive environments and characters come to life, they start as game concept art — the early sketches and visual ideas that establish the game’s identity. Whether it's character concept art for heroes or villains, or intricate landscape concept art, it all begins here.
Concept art is a form of artwork used to explore and develop visual ideas before they are put into a final product, like a video game, animation, film, or comic book.
This is an essential step in the process of visualizing a world and the landscapes, characters, and items that populate it. The role of concept artwork in video game development is to bridge the gap between writers and game developers, forming a visual identity and cohesive style across multiple teams, ensuring consistency in the final product. The best examples of game concept art can be seen in iconic titles, like Final Fantasy art and The Legend of Zelda concept art, where the visual style is as memorable as the gameplay itself.
As early as the 1930s, concept art has been a core component of the creative process. In 1937, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs made history as the world’s first full-length animated feature film. Art director Gustaf Tenggren created concept sketches and character art exploring the rustic cottages, dark forests, and delightful animals later seen in the film. His early illustrations laid the visual foundation, ensuring a cohesive art style and guiding the entire production process.
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Inside the Creative Process
Tools and Techniques for Video Game Concept Art
Since Snow White, concept art has developed far beyond hand-drawn illustrations and oil paintings. As technology has developed, concept art also started being used in the creation of a new form of media - video games. For concept artists working on modern video games, digital drawing technology and advanced graphics software has largely replaced traditional tools in the practice of creating concept art. In contemporary game development, game concept art can span varying levels of detail from initial sketches to fully detailed 3D renderings. This requires contemporary concept artists to understand a wider range of tools, including 3D modeling software like Blender, or game engines like Unreal Engine.
Integrating detailed 3D renders early in development enables game developers to visualize their fully realized game more quickly, enhancing traditional sketches and 2D concept art. The following images showcase an early concept painting alongside a 3D render, illustrating the progression from initial ideas to a more defined, realistic vision.
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Game Development Timeline
The information game concept artists receive before beginning their work can vary widely depending on the studio, some artists work directly alongside game designers and developers, able to access all the preliminary information about a game, while others may receive only a short description. Based on this information, game concept artists begin their work with the goal of fleshing out the world visually, providing direction to the developers who will eventually code the game. Concept artists tend to work in close dialogue with these other teams, ultimately packaging their work before handing it off to developers to realize what they’ve imagined. Concept art can be presented in a number of forms, including detailed style guides, breakdowns, turnaround sheets, and animation poses and storyboards.
Types of Video Game Concept Art
Character Concept Art
Creating memorable game characters requires an intense attention to detail to ensure that the identity, intentions, and emotions of the character shine through. Character concept art blends the game’s art style with character lore, using expressions, poses, attire, and various other details to create a memorable hero or villain. Game concept artists may be tasked with creating a character from scratch, but more often they will be working from an existing character.
Consider Link, the recurring protagonist in The Legend of Zelda games. His core identity and appearance have remained consistent across decades of Zelda titles, but his backstory, abilities, and aesthetic are more fluid between games. This creates a challenge for character concept artists who must walk the line between creating a new and interesting character while also maintaining the identity of past games.
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Creature and Monster Concept Art
Designing creatures and monsters opens the door for uniquely creative game concept art, enabling artists to design beings that don’t exist in reality. Some creatures are inspired by familiar figures, such as dragon or robot concept art, while others are entirely new. For example, compare the epic dragon concept art illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano for Final Fantasy to the strange, scorpion-like monster concept art from Skyrim. When creating an entirely new creature, game concept artists must go beyond the aesthetics and consider how the monsters move, sound, and attack. These designs start as simple concepts but evolve into creatures that define a game's atmosphere and provide challenging enemies for players to defeat.
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Environment Concept Art
Environment concept art sets the tone for a game by defining the look and feel of its landscapes, buildings, and textures. Whether historical or futuristic, each environment shapes how the player experiences the world. A well-crafted environment can make players feel warm or cold, free or trapped, safe or in danger, etc. For example the concepts from Skyrim depict a lush, green landscape with medieval architecture while the neon cityscape of Cyberpunk 2077 places players into a highly advanced and chaotic future. These spaces aren’t just backdrops—they’re integral to the storytelling and gameplay experience.
Object and Weapon Concept Art
Although item and weapon art may seem like a small detail, these objects provide a finishing touch by populating the entire game world and providing essential functionality to the player. From swords and shields to futuristic gadgets, these objects are designed to blend seamlessly with the game’s aesthetic. Beyond their appearance, each object should feel functional within the game’s universe, visually conveying its weight, power, or purpose. Through careful attention to detail, concept artists ensure that even the smallest items contribute to the overall style of the game.
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Evolution of Video Game Concept Art
Shift to Realism and 3D
The evolution of video game concept art has mirrored the technological advancements in both gaming and digital art. Initially, concept art was primarily hand-drawn, using traditional mediums like pencil and ink. As technology advanced, digital tools like Photoshop became central to the process, allowing artists to produce more detailed and flexible designs. With the rise of 3D modeling software, concept art evolved further, now including fully rendered 3D models that could be manipulated, textured, and easily viewed from multiple angles. This shift has allowed developers to visualize game worlds with greater precision and integrate designs directly into game engines, creating a seamless connection between concept and final in-game assets.
Stylization in Indie Games
While hyperrealistic 3D environments might be correct for some games, they can be costly to develop, and are not correct for every game’s story, in light of these limitations, many Indie games have more adventurous visual styles, uniquely serving their game’s world. Examples of this broad range of styles can include the minimalist, white-box style of Super Hot, to the retro textures of Animal Well. By employing more distinct styles, Indie games are able to embrace their technical limitations while offering more imaginative visual worlds, built on the work of game concept artists early on in the process.
Advances in Technology: Virtual Reality
As technology continues to advance, virtual reality (VR) is pushing the boundaries of concept art in game development. VR demands an entirely immersive experience, where players can interact with game environments from every angle. This has transformed how concept artists approach their work, requiring them to think beyond traditional screens and design fully explorable, 360-degree worlds. With VR, game concept art must now encompass not only visual aesthetics but also spatial design and player interaction, leading to new techniques and tools that allow artists to create more dynamic and immersive game experiences.
Behind-the-Scenes Examples from Iconic Games
Final Fantasy Concept Art
The Final Fantasy series has long been defined by its distinct visual identity, and much of that comes from the work of Yoshitaka Amano. His detailed illustrations have helped shape the franchise’s numerous characters and worlds. Amano has a unique ability to create a universe that feels larger than the game itself, and this has likely been instrumental the series’ success. From the delicate lines of the Warrior of Light to the otherworldly designs of Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud and Aerith, his art goes beyond character design, creating a rich, layered narrative through concept art.
Amano himself sees video games as a medium for storytelling through art, explaining, "I create everything in the games industry as if it were art." His process for creating game concept art for the series often begins with very little information, relying on his imagination to fill in the gaps as game development progresses. This freedom allows Amano to establish a visual style that is both timeless and deeply tied to the mythology of Final Fantasy. His art has consistently elevated the narrative, creating a world that players can feel immersed in, long before they even begin to play.
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Cyberpunk 2077 Concept Art
The visual style of Cyberpunk concept art plays a critical role in defining the atmosphere of Night City, blending gritty, futuristic aesthetics with distinct cultural influences. Concept artist Marthe Jonkers explained that the design draws heavily from the lore of Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk 2020, incorporating elements from the 1980s while developing a world that feels unique and contemporary. “We wanted to make something unique and make our own cyberpunk world,” Jonkers noted, highlighting the team's effort to build upon the source material while adding new layers of style and history to the environments.
To achieve this, the team developed four distinct architectural styles—entropism, kitsch, neo-militarism, and neo-kitsch—that define different eras and social classes in Night City. This approach allowed them to embed a sense of history into the city’s design, with each building, street, and object telling part of the world’s story. Jonkers described the process: “We tried to add layers to the city to make it more believable,” with entropism reflecting a utilitarian, bleak period and kitsch representing brighter, more hopeful times. Through these styles, Cyberpunk 2077’s concept art built a world that feels dynamic, alive, and reflective of the game's complex social structure.
The Legend of Zelda Concept Art
The Legend of Zelda series has long been known for its ever-evolving art style, with each game offering a new visual identity that matches its tone and gameplay. From the darker tones of Twilight Princess to the bright, whimsical world of Wind Waker, the series has continuously pushed boundaries in visual storytelling. Through experimentation, each team strives to make every new game feel fresh, inviting players into a world that feels both familiar and entirely new.
Art director Satoru Takizawa explained in Creating a Champion,
“I imagine there are a lot of people who have wondered why the visuals for The Legend of Zelda change with each new entry in the series. We look for the best way to express the unique spirit of that particular game and create a world that will be exciting for players to jump into and explore. Often, the results come from trial and error.”
For Breath of the Wild concept art was key to creating a massive open world that invites exploration. The team worked to combine realism with the game’s more fantastical and playful elements, creating a world that feels natural, cheerful, and alive. Takizawa described it as “a contraction of reality,” where visual shortcuts—like instantly chopping wood or cooking—helped keep the experience fluid without pulling players out of the moment. The BoTW concept art focused on how landscapes, like open fields and towering cliffs, would not only look but also function within the gameplay, laying the groundwork for a world that feels dynamic and responsive to the player's actions.
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What’s Next? Why Video Game Concept Art remains Essential for Game Development
As production budgets for large-scale video games continue to rise, the role of concept art in shaping a game's visual world before it's committed to code becomes even more crucial. Simultaneously, as gaming has grown into the most popular and lucrative form of entertainment, competition has intensified. In a saturated market, the imagination and skill of concept artists can be the defining factor that sets a game apart.
This focus on creativity also helps protect concept art from becoming dominated by AI-generated art. In a field centered on imagined worlds, technology trained on existing images faces a natural limitation that individual artists do not. Video games thrive on fantastical, original ideas—creations that machines struggle to replicate.