Hey Pioneers,
I am Katja, the 3D Character Artist working at Envision Entertainment, and today I pick up the topic of readability from our last dev blog and talk about the latest changes that our Intern Judith and I worked on together.
Like our buildings we also want our characters to offer a lot of personality and storytelling through their design to enrich the overall feeling and immersion of the world. For a long time, our main focus was creating individual looks for the many different professions, enemies or creatures that exist in the world of Pagonia. This is still an ongoing topic, as you may have noticed with the Forester in our latest patch. He got a completely unique design fitting his nature-loving job and his very own stylish backpack for carrying all kinds of saplings.
New Forester incl. backpack
Our latest efforts were to improve readability, i.e. reworking and expanding unit variations which already had variations and adding new ones to those that still were lacking some.
In the very early development when our focus was mainly on building new designs for new units rather than expanding on variations, we used a rather simple formula to create unit variations. This was usually just adding come color highlights or tinting certain parts of the clothing. As time allowed later during production, we started focusing more on variations designs while modeling the characters.
In this blog I will highlight four of the units that we have improved even though we have also reworked most of the military units and a few enemy types. If you look closely while playing Pioneers of Pagonia, you might notice some other improved unit variations.
Our Goal & Approach
With the goal of improving the readability we had to think about what was making the current unit variations hard to differentiate. Just adding some color highlights like we did to the Spectres and Bandits created the issue that the highlights were getting harder to read when zoomed out far or were washed out completely. And of course, this kind of variation design did not really add to the personality and storytelling of the unit.
In order to control the design not only through texture variations, we also decided to work with the models themselves. Of course, creating completely new and unique designs for every variation would be an overkill not only time wise but also within the game itself. As a player you already have to get to know and distinguish between all of your seven military units and six enemy types. Expanding those units with even more differentiating character designs would have made it too chaotic. We wanted to keep the essence of a character and try to tell a story regarding the character’s rank and experience as the names of the different ranks already do. For the players’ units we also considered what kind of resources are needed to recruit a certain rank and tried to implement that as well in some of the variant designs.
Bandits
For each unit we put together notes on the character’s personality and key elements. Since the Bandit’s design is kind of “birdlike” with the feathery cape you could think of them as stealing magpies or bowerbirds. They raid and steal your stuff and would potentially like to decorate themselves with their stolen treasures.
My idea was to reflect this in their appearance and give them silver and gold details that they would have made from stolen weapons and ores. The Elite Bandit, being not only the strongest but also somewhat of a leader personality in the Bandits ranks, has some additional weapons they carry and of course lots of gold reinforced details in their clothing.
Our intern Judith created some design proposals based on those characteristics which you can see here.
While all of the designs have their own charm and some design aspects may look cooler or more interesting than others at first glance, the most important aspect for the design was to consider whether it will be easy to read in the default game camera distance. This is why all design proposals include a top-down view, to check what details will actually be visible and pop out in this perspective and which were maybe too small-scale for our style.
While the intricate jewelry hanging between the feathers of the Bandit’s cape looks like they used some of the stolen treasures, we agreed that in the game perspective and default zoom they may be too small to really pop and make the character visibly different from the other ranks. That’s why we decided to go with the gold-plated feathers. It's easy to see them from far away and they are not melting into the cape color in the silver version for the Veteran Bandit.
Soldiers
The Soldier was one of the very first units in general but also the very first military unit in Pioneers of Pagonia. He has a knight-like appearance though he is not completely armored. The Veteran Soldier, for example, has big shoulder pads, metal bracers and a helmet with a big fluffy feather which protects him against any type of enemy unit for a long while.
There are four strength levels of the Soldier. The simple Soldier uses a wooden shield and a bronze sword, the Advanced Soldier an iron sword with a wooden shield. The Veteran Soldier uses an iron sword and shield, and the Elite Soldier has a big steel shield and mace. We decided to keep the original design for the full iron soldier. The first and second version are known to be lighter versions of the design with no helmets and the first soldier looks more squire-like without the metal armor. The second one is more in-between level 1 and 3 with an iron shoulder pad, bracers and a gorget.
Since the fourth and strongest soldier uses a steel mace and a big and heavy steel shield, I decided to adapt the heaviness of his weapons into his armor giving him additional chainmail for heavy attack protection and a bigger and more protecting helmet. My goal was to make him stand out and be recognizable as the strongest and most elite soldier like his name suggests.
Guards
Our Guards are brave women that not only expand the territory sometimes not knowing what's behind the mysterious fog but also ready to run into battle and protect the villagers when they happen to come across enemies.
They did have some visual distinctions showing in their armor, but we wanted to enhance the readability. As long as you are expanding your territory you have to rely on your Guards. Depending on where you are sending them to expand (maybe somewhere you know that danger is nearby) being able to distinguish between them will help you make the right decision which Guards to send to the border of your territory.
Similar to the Soldier variations I kept the original design for the Veteran Guard and simplified the simple Guard, removing her helmet and chain armor as she also doesn't need a chainmail as a resource when being recruited. The Elite Guard also uses steel armor and a very big sharp and pointy steel halberd. That's why I gave her a more prominent helmet with steel reinforcement and a pointy tip matching her halberd, a chain hood and several steel reinforcements on the gloves and boots.
Spectres
I had the most fun reworking the Spectre variations. Even though I did not stray too far away from their highlight colors, I did increase the usage of their color scheme and added more "accessories" to create a more interesting and unique silhouette. With the chains that the Restless and the Haunting Spectres are wearing I wanted to suggest what type of being they had been before they were buried and forgotten in the Broken Tomb. With chains around its arms and being chained to its tomb for a long time, now wonder the Restless Spectre deserved his name for being ... well ... restless.
The Haunting Spectre is of course a master of fright and the strongest of the Spectres.
Its name suggests that it not only likes to scare away the occasional Pagonian crossing their way. But also that it has made haunting poor souls its only purpose ... or hobby?
The Haunting Spectre has not only broken free from its chains like the Restless Spectre but is also wearing one of the chains around its body like a belt. Every move and every swirl create a spine-chilling sound that will make even the bravest soldier shriek and run.
In addition to the extension of using the variation color I also adjusted the "body" colors of the Spectres fitting their general color scheme. I also changed the colors of their ghostly VFX as well.
As you can see, being a 3D Character Artist for Pioneers of Pagonia is not only creating the characters from concepts but also putting in a lot of our own creativity into the designs. For me personally, it is a lot of fun taking over the creative responsibility and challenging myself to create a character design that radiates an interesting personality and tells a story while still fitting into our established style and worldbuilding of Pioneers of Pagonia.
And of course, I hope that you guys enjoy our hustling and bustling little Pagonians and creatures as much as I had fun creating them.
If you want, check out the improved buildings from our last dev blog or some of the reworked resources and deposits in our latest update. You can find all of the changes in our detailed patch notes. As always, we’re very excited for your reactions to the upcoming patch and looking forward to everyone’s feedback once again.