Hey Reavers!
The holidays are over and we’re in full swing, with this next piece we feel we’ve teased enough of what’s to come, so we’re handing the mic to one of our artists whose tirelessly spent their time working on our “1 BILLION” modular assets to bring the world of Blood Reaver to life.
Snapping Together
"I’m Jackson Smith, an Environment Artist for Blood Reaver who had the pleasure of making the ruins/buildings that make up the environment of our first map. Believe it or not, these buildings are built out of a 300+ piece modular set that I was working on over my initial 5 months on the project. I’ll never forget being told, “We will start you off with a quick on-boarding task, say about 19 pieces to start and we can move you onto some props” by our Lead Artist Flynn only to see it quickly balloon into the single biggest asset list on the project. Nevertheless, I dug my heels in and got to work!"
"As mentioned, the modular set includes over 300+ pieces. These include a variety of different walls, trimmings, rails, pillars, doorways and many other necessary parts of what makes a building. One of the biggest criteria given to me by our Producer Euan, was that he wanted to be able to have the buildings look destroyed. This was by far the hardest part of the task as well as the reason why there are so many pieces to the modular set. Each asset I made needed to have a destroyed variation of itself, some even had 4-5 different variations to give the level designers maximum creativity and variety when it came to destruction within the environment. Sometimes, they yearned for a little too much creative freedom. However, with Euan demanding our Technical Artist Ben to rig the floor modules to allow for “editing modules on the fly”... Safe to say this demand was swiftly rejected. This meant that there was A LOT of trial and error with every asset to make sure that they not only snapped together perfectly no matter how they were rotated but also had their textures lining up seamlessly. To make the texturing process as easy as possible, I only used a single stone trim sheet for a large majority of the modular set aside from any dirt, wood or tiles that required their own separate texture."
Snapping to the World
"When making the modular assets, I not only had to consider how the pieces fit together but also how they integrated into the world of Blood Reaver. I really wanted to push the dark fantasy stronghold aesthetic we wanted for our first map so I purposefully kept things simple, brutalist and sharp to suit that narrative. This involved gathering inspiration from both real life and fantasy castles to make sure I was setting the right tones. These tones would be shown through the shapes/sizes of the brick stone works all the way to the specific colour pallets of all the assets to make sure players know that this is what a Blood Reaver Fortress would look like. After many, many hours of planning, modelling, iterating and implementing, I was able to produce a modular set that I am very proud to have been a part of... finally, I was just starting to think I’d never finish my orientation."
“Ben please just rig the floors” ~ Euan, Director
SAGE Season
With the new year, we also celebrated our 2nd year as a part of The South Australian Game Exhibition as part of their main showcase. It was wonderful to see so many talented studios and creators in one space and share our ideas, and Blood Reaver once again proved to be a fan favourite.
"You guys have COOKED" - SAGE attendant
Recipe For Success
Like mentioned earlier, we’ve teased you enough and dangled this golden carrot in front of you for a few months now, but now it’s time for us to dig deep and really get into the nitty gritty of production. Sadly, this means we’re going to go a little dark on the updates in the coming months. However, we are still posting regular updates in our official discord! As well as releasing closed alpha codes for Steam, so keep an eye out for those in our discord wink.
Thank you all for your continued support and keep an eye on our progress to come.