Concept Art Followup

Although the main brainstorming aspect of the game’s concept art is over, in one sense we only took a surface look at eight cultures. For example, so we could iterate quickly, I didn’t ask for color sketches. But color is something that’s obviously important for the look of the game, and Jan and I are discussing it now. (By the way, I highly recommend Blue: The History of a Color, although you probably need to track down a used copy or check it out of a library). And Jan is also trying to make sense of my “take the hat from this sketch, and the man’s shirt from this sketch (but change the length), and the woman’s pants from this one” instructions.

And the artists are asking questions about whether there would be jade, or if it’s too far from the ocean for a certain people to have shell beads. In one sense, it doesn’t matter — it’s a game, about a fictional world. But it’s the sort of attention to detail I think really matters. It’s important to fit into the Gloranthan canon, but it’s even more important to be portraying a a realistic and consistent setting. A player won’t know or care that a drawing of a woman with a pearl earring is “correct,” but the game is building up a story out of hundreds of pictures. If they each tell a different story, the overarching epic is not as strong. It’s great to be working with artists who care not only about how a single image should have a range of colors, but also how they are contributing to the overall story.

Art review at A Sharp

By the way, in the last post I forgot to include the picture of the review meeting Elise Bowditch and I had, with printouts spread all over. (In our informal meetings I would often bring up images on an iPad. Even though as a developer we have a number of iPads, we don’t have that many — the paperless office is still a vision for the future.)