BBBen AIF
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Dev diary - Our amazing castle cross-section art
🕑 Added 2023-01-18 22:00:01 +0000 UTCIn a previous post I talked about the prototype I made for our "manor" (castle) screen, but I also wanted to talk about the art itself. As you can see, it's pretty incredible. It certainly wasn't cheap - but I can confidently say it was a huge bargain!
Upgrading the manor
The piece is broken down into layers, so that the rooms can be upgraded as you progress through the game and the manor will change to reflect these changes. We also designed it so that the layers of foreground and background would be separate, so that it can shift on the zoom to create a "parallax effect" that makes the whole thing look sort of 3D.
Above I've shown how the manor looks when fully upgraded, cleaned up and rebuilt to the height of its glory, but that won't be the case when you start playing - you and your maids will need to work hard to get the manor to that beautiful state from where it starts:
I mean... it's still an awesome castle, but it's a bit of a pig sty, right? That's going to need some elbow grease.
It's a big achievement
This was a huge project for our artist, Gil. The piece needed to be so complex that we could zoom into each individual room and have it work as a mini-background unto itself. We needed an extremely talented artist for this and so we were very lucky that Gil was available.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this took a lot of work to make. The fact that we have this done, along with a lot of other stuff, should probably prove that this game is already well underway, even if the playable parts of it aren't that far in yet.
My feeble sketch vs a real artist's sketch
To give you an idea what Gil had to work with, here's my concept sketch (humiliation at my lack of art skills incoming in 3... 2... 1...):
Now, this wasn't actually supposed to look good, of course. I was just outlining roughly what we needed. We then had a bunch of conversations about how this would work, what else I might need, etc, and I made it clear that this was only a rough guide and Gil should feel free to change things as he needed to.
Imagine how I felt when he returned this sketch to show me what he was planning.
We took our time
This game has been in pre-production for a long time precisely because I wanted to give the artists loads of time to work on the characters and the environments. I didn't want to be too hard about deadlines and I knew a lot of this would take some time.
Well, it did take a lot of time, but that wasn't a problem! That's allowed us to very carefully put the team together and work on all aspects of the development in detail.
Comments
Frank Kuschmann
Yes, and also because you are speaking a clear and correct English and probably because you try to avoid abbreviations and slang and this so-called SMS-language that many of the younger people are speaking todays. The same thing happens with our beautiful and rich German language. The youngsters are speaking only a sort of Pidgeon-German yet - lol.
BBBen AIF
Oh, I'm glad to hear that. I have no idea why that would be the case, but perhaps it's because I try very hard to avoid ambiguous phrases.
NakedAlice
Gil did an amazing job on this project and really proved that he is a true professional in his field. I am pleased with the work of your close-knit team
Frank Kuschmann
I love the way you're speaking, Ben. It's really easy to understand for me as German. I almost don't need a dictionary anymore.
BBBen AIF
Thanks. :D I do hope we can make some good progress, though. And I also hope that people will respond to the writing since that's the part that I actually make myself, rather than getting artists in to help.
Frank Kuschmann
I'm sure you all do it very well, Ben. And taking your time is very important to achieve a perfect result. If you consider that Venus Noire work on their game "Seeds of Chaos" six years meanwhile and it's only the first part of three planned parts of it, then it's only natural that you're also taking your time if you want to achieve the development of a masterpiece of game. As a lover of a good storyline and entertaining dialogues I hope you won't forget that even though the most players todays only want to see yet CG's and animations. Sadly it seems there isn't almost anyone anymore who still wants to experience exciting dialogues and an extensive storyline. You know I love especially when Az'ea has a bossy and loose tongue - lol.
