Hi folks!
After the Steam Festival, we now return to our regular broadcasts - talking about the game we’re making. I’ve talked my lead artist boi Ivan into writing this one as well since it’s more in his domain than mine. I just made it readable, as usual.
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Like everything else, the task starts with an idea. The idea comes from our beautiful writers Jonas and Verena, like with this example of Breunor:
“A man of great passion and deep melancholy, Sir Breunor is driven by the death of his father, whose armour he wears. He once wished to become a Knight of the Round Table, but abandoned that dream when Arthur died.”
If needed, the artists who do the concept art talk about the description, to work out any vague details. In this case, the description was enough to get started.
When the concept art is done and we’re happy with it, we start the high-poly sculpt of the character. When doing this, we consider the fact the camera in the game cannot get too close to the units, so we don’t make it too detailed and complex.
After we have the high-poly sculpt, we move on to make the low-poly model. Our tech artist Toni takes this phase into his hands and does the retopology of the model. When that’s done, he goes directly into doing the weight painting and rigging the model for animations. At the same time, our texture guru Kaz does the textures for the model.
After this is all done, all that’s left is animating the character. Considering the number of artists in the team is low (just 5), and the ambitions for the game are great, everybody does almost every art task - except animations. Animations are done by just two of us, without either of us having direct ownership of the entire character’s animation. We collaborate over them and fine-tune them together until we’re both satisfied.
There’s one step veiled in mystery that just seems to happen suddenly during any point of this process (and something we even forget, so it happens later), and that’s the portrait of the unit which is featured in Merlin’s Journal and in combat.
Everything done so far is ready for one final test - adding the model into the editor where we see if anything needs to be tweaked. For instance, whether the gloss mask on the helmet is too shiny, or how the animations look in the game when moving, as opposed to being animated in place in Blender, etc.
Also, each character needs to be assigned animation events, like on which frame of the animation is the damage dealt, when is any SFX played, particles, etc. This part is also done by the artists since it’s tied to the feel of each character.
And finally, Breunor is alive! This is when we let our game designer Mat teach the guy how to fight by giving him skills and stats.
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Thanks for reading. Make sure you wishlist the game, and come join our Discord to ask questions, complain about the state of the demo, or just hang out. I also have a Twitter thing if you're interested.
MarkoP