King of Dragon Pass had
great art, but we’re trying to go even better with the concept art for Six Ages. As I said
last time, we’re trying to be cool and distinctive, which weren’t explicit goals in King of Dragon Pass. And of course, we now have the excellent art from the
Guide to Glorantha to live up to.
Looking back at the original KoDP art, we had only 11 concept sketches, from two artists. For Six Ages, we’ve asked for 72, and have three concept artists. Partly this is because the KoDP concept art only portrayed the Orlanthi settlers (although the game ended up showing 7 other human cultures, plus a couple of historical ones). Glorantha is full of different people, and we might as well figure out what they look like up front.
The team has assembled an extensive set of art reference, drawing from the web as well as printed sources, in a number of languages. (Our shared Dropbox folder is over half a gigabyte.) I borrowed a couple more Osprey books from my brother-in-law, and bought a few more (thanks in part to some good suggestions). A few library books were disappointing only because
First Ancient History already included the same illustrations. I also found a few other useful books in my personal library, which I had forgotten about.
We should be wrapping up before the end of the year, and I hope to show you a little of the work in a future post.
I really enjoyed the art in KoDP and the style fit the game perfectly. It felt very fresh and distinctive of any other computer game out there at the time, or even now. I’m sure there are many things that contribute to that such as the subject matter itself, the art having a very traditional feel to it (water colour) and the music. Really looking forward to what you come up with next!
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