Last week we talked about the game in general, so in this post we wanted to talk about the first world region. The game starts with the player gathering his party of heroes (we’ll talk about heroes in a future post) and setting off on a quest to find the Holy Grail. The game uses the mythos of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table, and using some creative freedom, we’re purposefully skewing the legends surrounding Camelot and Arthur in order to tell a story that sounds familiar, but not quite exact or correct. We’ll talk more about the story in a later post. For today, we wanted to show some pieces of the region you’ll be going through when you start the game - Albion.
(Albion, circa 2017)
The first iteration of the region was a bare bones background image with a bunch of points linked together with lines. Not the most impressive of sights, but it set the foundation of the gameplay for that part of the game. The first working (as in, not a prototype) version was represented as a table with a map of the region drawn on paper, and the notable locations were marked with flags (as they are today). As the game was 2D, and we wanted to fit the entire map on the screen at once, we had some trouble putting every important element on the screen. That version went through many iterations to nail down the gameplay feel, and after the transition to Serious Engine, we decided to simply make the map a full 3D environment, with an in-world camera that can pan around. This solved the issue with having to put everything on a single screen, so we were happy with that.
(Albion today)
All of the mentioned art was done by our lead artist, Ivan. He started as a digital 2D artist and animator, and was in charge of making the first units, back when it was all 2D. After we decided to change units to be 3D, over time Ivan learned how to use Blender and 3DCoat. Leveraging his formal education as an artist, he became quite good at it and today we can even say his art doesn’t suck anymore. Mostly. ;)
As our lead artist he usually drives the tasks of the other artists, and makes sure the art style is consistent. If we need to make a decision on something related to art, we usually all chime in with opinions, pros and cons, and make a group decision since we all sit in the same room. However, if anything does go wrong we just blame Ivan. Even for things unrelated to art.
(the tool we use to make the regions)
In a later post, we’ll write up about how we create the regions themselves, but for the very next post we wanted to talk about the presentation of encounters to the player - the Book of Merlin (made up title, because it’s just an actual in-game book), so stay tuned and join us on The Hand of Merlin Discord server if you have any questions or suggestions for blog topics you’d like us to write about.
MarkoP