Hello everyone!
My name is Honza, and I work as the art director for our game. In this brief write-up, I'd like to offer you a glimpse into our process of creating the visuals for The House of Tesla.
Among our initial and most important tasks was crafting a cohesive, unified vision for how our world is going to look. Coming from The House of Da Vinci, we knew we wanted to create an environment just as rich and compelling as the one presented in our previous projects. Luckily, our colleagues from the story department provided us with the perfect backdrop for a visually engaging experience: a narrative that takes place in a time of great technological, industrial, and societal change. These grand shifts also prompted the rise of unique artistic movements, be it in fine arts, architecture, or fashion, so there was no shortage of places for us to look for inspiration.
For our team of artists, the journey begins with a script and an overview of all the puzzles, mysterious places, and strange devices the player is going to encounter. Sometimes, we feel like the players themselves, scrambling our minds while trying to understand the wicked inventions our coworkers came up with. Because we are always striving for an authentic period look, we start by researching the actual places our characters inhabited, the technology they used (or invented), as well as looking at works by great artists of the era; in our case, for example, Alphonse Mucha, Louis Majorelle, or the brilliant architect Daniel Burnham. From then on, our amazing concept artists work closely with the gameplay department to flesh out the first rough sketches, ensuring that every creative decision we make supports the experience they designed.
When we are happy with those, we can move on to adding more details, while aiming to keep the look of everything consistent throughout the whole experience. We're also always focusing on visual storytelling and finding interesting ways to help make the player feel like they’re visiting a rich, lived-in world. I can’t tell you how many times I came to the story folks with a request like 'We have a stack of books in a dimly lit corner, do you have any pointers as to what person X might have been reading?' only to come back with book recommendations that would fill a library even Mark Twain would not be ashamed of. Once we're satisfied with the overall look, layout, and mood, we move into 3D prototyping.
After translating the ideas of our concept artists into three dimensions, we can begin to determine the final composition of scenes, the player's movement, and the finer technical details of how Tesla's wondrous machines operate. This is where our talented 3D modelers join in on the fun, informing us that this moving thing actually can’t be where it is because it obstructs another moving thing, thereby preventing the third moving thing from moving at all. Fortunately, they almost certainly devise a solution even before presenting us with the problem. However, all of this is just the beginning of our work; the next step is to create the final assets with which the player will interact in the game. Perhaps we can delve deeper into those at another time.
Thank you for reading our little article. I hope it provided at least a small window into the initial stages of our process. Because we're still more comfortable with creating pictures than writing words, as a token of gratitude, here’s a little sneak peek of one of the other characters players will encounter in our game. Can you guess who it will be?
Honza
Art Director
Blue Brain Games
