Hi guys!
I’ve been thinking having a game with this type of art would be interesting to try out:
Especially the building in the background looks cool.
However I do not know where to begin. Would it be in the textures or the engine/post process?
You’re just talking about the reflections? That’s as simple as having an interesting (dark) roughness map and normal map on whatever your ground plane is. Then turn up the Screen Space Reflections up in the post process volume and let Unreal do the rest.
I’d say, you achieve something similar to the style in concept art pieces.
You’re looking at a combination of materials/textures, and some post-processing. The reason these concept art pieces are so appealing, is a very simple one. They only have detail where it really counts. Some areas that aren’t important to what they want to viewer to see are really quite simplistic.
Hmm alright.
Do you think having a first-person assassin/gun game set on the titanic would fit this style? I’m having conflicting thoughts on the subject…
I think you’ve just described The Ship, one of the greatest games ever! Game play wise at least, although they are remaking it to bring the graphics up to date.
And if you haven’t played it I have a few free copies in my steam inventory.
An interesting challenge… As says, the appeal is mostly down to the selective simplification of different areas. There are almost no gradients, color dabs are quite uniform in tone and have distinct edges etcetera.
It would require a lot of experimenting, but recreating something like that would probably entail a combination of textures and postprocessing. Textures would need to be decidedly “painterly” themselves, with a limited palette, no smearing/gradients, quite geometric strokes with apparent brushwork. You could probably get ~75% there just by texturing alone.
For post, you’d be looking at something like quantizing perhaps (could be fairly easy to implement with a custom LUT) but ideally you would also want something similar to a “smart blur” and I have no idea how feasible that is, or, if possible, how expensive it would be in terms of processing. The perfect solution would maybe tank your framerate something fierce 
