Hey Anno Community,
Get your rakes, shears and watering cans ready: it’s time for a deep dive into our upcoming Cosmetic DLC, the Blooming Cities Pack!
In today’s DevBlog we give you an overview of its content, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at how this pack has been created, with an insightful Q&A with Art Director Reiko and Senior Prop Artist Laura!
If you’d like to admire this wonderful pack in action, then make sure to watch the VOD of our livestream dedicated to the Blooming Cities Pack.
Patterns: Flowers & Gardens
Sometimes the simplest things are the most exciting – and this is exactly how we feel about the flowers and gardens patterns in this pack. Just like Art Director Reiko put it, “Not every asset needs to be shiny, grand and amazing – sometimes it’s all about the small puzzle pieces and building blocks that you combine however you want to create shiny, grand and amazing things”.
In the screenshot above you can see how majestic the city gardens can become: the colour combinations you can get are seemingly infinite. These are gardens most worthy of a true governor! Grandeur and magnificence are not the only things that can be created with these patterns, of course. Look how cosy and organic they can be, by filling in spaces between buildings and around the city. These patterns are extremely versatile and easy to play with to get the best results – whatever the vibe you’re going for!
Your choice is vast: from lilies to dandelions and poppies – and why not add some cypresses or even some exotic palm trees for some shade under the warm summer sun? Each of their tiles is made up of different type of assets, randomly assembled, to create such a natural look, and by combining those tiles yourself, you can amplify that organic effect even more.
Statues, ponds and the Temple of Flora
Great gardens deserve great statues and fountains, too. Look how pretty the Pool of Virtue is, for example: it perfectly marries the overgrown nature of Albion in this screenshot.
The statues were the most challenging piece to create for me. I don’t usually sculpt a lot of organic human-like stuff, so getting that to look believable was tricky. But I had the most fun with the ponds. I enjoyed arranging the flowers and to look at the water and just feel the whimsy in me. (Laura, Senior Prop Artist)
If you are looking for a BIG centre piece instead… well, then the Temple of Flora will make your cities look magical, just like in this screenshot taken at night.
What’s truly magical about this Temple is not just the beautiful and mesmerising fairy lights you see at night, but the way it behaves when placed next to an aqueduct… but more on that in the Q&A section – so make sure to keep reading!
It’s aqueduct, not aqua-duck!
With Blooming Cities, even the aqueduct gets a new look that perfectly fits the aesthetic of the Wall of the Domus and the Temple of Flora with a striking contrast between white and blue.
Q&A with the Art Team
(Q) Can you tell us more about the garden and flower patterns and how they work?
(A) Laura: The landscape patterns use the same polygon system we have brought to life for Anno 117: Pax Romana, just with minor tweaks like not being able to build on them. The farm fields and the mosaics use the same system already. Its randomisation works through variation. If we have a 1×1 piece, there will be 3 or 4 of such pieces which get randomly changed and thus variation “naturally” happens.
(A) Reiko: The result is that you can now get extremely organic areas in the game. So, you can just drag your cursor, and the trees will do whatever we design on the art side.
(Q) The Temple of Flora is the big centrepiece of this Pack – what can you tell us about this beautiful ornament?
(A) Reiko: When it comes to the Temple of Flora, we changed our approach there a little bit and my direction was really to make it shiny and to place lights that might not necessarily make sense in time. Nowadays when you see big cathedrals and churches, usually they install a lot of floodlights around on the buildings to give them a beam of light that looks awesome at night. They didn’t do that back in the day, of course, but right here with these assets, we partially do it. We do it with the fountains, we do it with the Temple of Flora. And it makes a hell of a difference because at night, dawn, when the fireflies come out and start flying around, it looks magical. It’s allowed to look out of place. Other assets are not necessarily allowed to look out of place.
If you placed something in an area that has good irrigation, you can plant different trees. And that’s the idea. Whenever you build the Temple of Flora near an aqueduct, all the flowers and trees get replaced. You get a much more exotic look and feel.
(Q) When it comes to inspiration – what is the aesthetic that inspired you for this Pack?
(A) Reiko: The inspiration in general, it started with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. We got inspired a lot by the Minoan Age, so we went back and used parts of it and “Romanised” them. The Temple of Flora, for example, looks a little bit like a temple with pagodas. It’s still something that is a leftover from Babylon. And we took it from there. We made it very white, the walls, white, bluish, a little bit of arches going on.
And the same stuff we translated towards the aqueduct and the walls, trying to make it fit and give it, that was the intent, a white backdrop. Especially because the flowers are extremely colourful. So, we wanted to have something white in the backdrop that you can just build up.
I knew that I wanted to have a lot of flowers, flowers that exist in real life, flowers that are living in Latium, so we have the poppies, for instance.
(Q) Any recommendations for our players on how to beautify their cities with this beautiful pack?
(A) Laura: I think especially in combination with the mosaics pack one can now build quite the colourful, exotic and lush gardens, even creating patterns and such. I am very intrigued indeed by what the players will come up with.
(A) Reiko: When you look at the flower patterns, for instance, they usually feature different colours. I mean, there’s the poppies, for instance, that are just red. But if you look at the colourful ones, there’s whites, there’s yellows, there’s purples inside. And that isn’t random. It means that you can have a colourful field somewhere and then place at the right point a perfect blue field to get this extremely organic mixed look. If I can give a recommendation to the community, then it would be the recommendation to build a lot and to share this online because we look at those screenshots. And of course, it’s also part of the feedback loop. We see what is used, what is never used. We leave the never used stuff out in the future, and we’ll try to make the stuff that is heavily used better and better.
And with this insightful Q&A, we are at the end of this DevBlog dedicated to the Blooming Cities Pack, which will be available starting June 18th on PC and consoles, for the price of 6.99€ or your regional equivalent.
The update releasing alongside the pack will also include one Latium- and one Albion-themed garden for everyone.
We cannot wait to see photos of your blooming cities!
List of all content
Temple of Flora (7×7)
Pool of Virtue (2×2)
Basin of Virtue (3×3)
Mason’s Sphinx (1×1)
Oleander (1×1)
Fig Tree (1×1)
Palm Tree (1×1)
Gum Tree (1×1)
Proud Pomegranate (2×2)
Stone Pine (1×1)
Wild Poppies
Sunny Alkanet
Dandelion Patch
Overgrowth
Lilac Wildflowers
Blooming Shrubs
Field of Lilies
Exotic Garden
Springtime Garden
Cypress Garden
Pine Garden
Exotic Fern Garden
Hellenic Skin (Aqueduct skin)
Wall of the Domus
Gate of the Domus