Hello everyone! I'm Dusty! The 3D artist working on Citizens: Far Lands! As part of our dev diaries, I thought it might be interesting to show you the art side of game development :)
When I first joined the team, I was asked to improve already existing designs of buildings. It wasn’t long before my affection for the game has translated into more than just a little rework however.
I had to rework over 50 buildings that were already in the game and it was quite a task. I'm used to creating realistic models which take more time than what Citizens required, and good news was that the buildings were very simple. Because of the sheer quantity however, it took a lot of time anyway. As you can imagine, creating an art asset, even a low poly one, can take anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours. If you want something really satisfying, you might find yourself even working for a few days! To save us time, I created a colour palette which would be applied to all graphical assets in the game. This resulted in easier texturing work and better game performance. I am pretty proud of the results!
Here's the palette at this point in production:
Most of the assets in the game use this one texture. We also have one like this, but with gradients to create smooth transitions between one colour and another.
At first the houses used to look like something out of ancient Greece. They were heavily inspired by Godus. Worker's House then and now:
Citizens has clearly defined "Civilisations". We meet a few of these in the game, but the inspiration for player's Civ comes from medieval Italy, France, Germany and England.
Townhall
Each building comes in 3 variants. "Standard", "Winter" and "Ruined". You can see an example below:
Tournament Field
Artisan's House
The destroyed variant comes because of the fire that can burn down the buildings or barbarians that can destroy them during raids. At the same time, our game designer, Kiwi, reworked almost all objects such as trees, cliffs and resources.
Before and After redesign:
Since Citizens also offers battles, I was tasked with creating unit art. At first, soldiers were very simplistic and without detail, as we weren't certain of how the battles were going to work and look. When things came together, I started detailing them, and ended up doing custom animations (initially all of our animations came from Adobe's Mixamo). The character has a modified version of the HumanIK skeleton from Maya LT. Animations and skeleton are very basic, they don't even have a control rig to be honest but they are working well with everything we have and satisfy our needs.
Each unit has at least one variant to make the soldiers look a little more different from each other
When all this came together, I thought that adding a little bit of life to the village was a good idea... So, I worked on some animations for characters working on buildings like you can see on the worker trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0etgCbZJw
At the end of the day I ended up modelling a lot of unique things which you'll see in Citizens, starting from whole new civilizations like Vikings, to enemy Bosses all the way through to Animals. I feel very proud of my work even if its nothing complex and I feel proud to be contributing to the game by giving it a little bit of fun and pleasant look. :)
Remember to Wishlist the game if you like it! Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this little writeup.