Looking for reference material for a "DIY game-show" theme

For a project I am currently working on, I am in the process of creating assets and exploring what would fit in with the game’s theme. The theme is a little different from what you would normally find within the game’s genre, so I’ve been having trouble finding sufficient reference material.

To summarize, the game’s theme is supposed to feel staged, meaning many assets will look cheap, handcrafted, efficient, do-it-yourself. But the world should also feel somewhat like a game show, so there will be a lot of cameras, wires, electricity boxes and so on. Colors will also be very saturated to fit in with other art styles you find in popular Roblox games. Here’s a snapshot of some assets I’ve already been working on, to get a bit of an idea of what I’m going for.

As you can see in the picture, I have so far created cheap wooden / metal fences, wooden scaffolding, lanterns, trees, painted arrows, game-show-like boxes and in the back some blocks of concrete bricks.

Progress has been a lot slower than I had hoped because I have been having trouble finding reference material for this sort of style & theme. I don’t know of many games sharing this sort of theme, so my question is, where can I find some fitting reference material?

If anyone knows of any fitting games or maybe artists that have published similar material, I’m hoping you could share it!

1 Like

Given that YouTube is the king of low-budget, I’d recommend taking a look there. In the past there have been quite a few attempts at low-budget game shows and you can find some good reference material if you look carefully. This is what i was able to find by searching “game show” and sorting by upload date. If you can find a way to remove that one channel that just spams uploads from the list you can probably get much better results.

Also worth noting that these are all indoor shows, but hopefully there’s still info to glean from them.

Here’s a crowd-funded game show that cost $90,000 and looks like it cost $90:

And here’s a JonTron video that actually looks pretty good:

And Smosh has a game show as well:

Also I found whatever this is and found it kinda funny. It’s not a game show.

1 Like