Hey everyone!

We wanted to show you another little piece of our game; The Reckless!

The Reckless is Amon’s ship, his pride and joy, pieced together from scraps of salvage he finds in the desert. Like I showed you in the last post, it hangs in the dockyard while he works on it, but we want him to be able to take it out to explore more of the world during the game.

Figured I’d show the process on it. Frits did the concept art, I did a quick ortho, a color pass and the textures. The always excellent Thomas Pasieka did the 3D work on it!

First up; concept art. This is a collection of the sketches Thomas was given to work with. 

Then Thomas set to work. Seeing as how we’re on different continents and timezones, we work via email, skype and dropbox and of course the Unity Asset Server. Typically I’ll come into work and find my dropbox updated with stuff like this, which brightens my day:

If just talking doesn’t cut it, we do a paintover with written descriptions. Here’s one of the feedback loops from Frits to Thomas: 

Once the 3D models sits right with all of us, we jump into UV mapping and texturing. We use 3DCoat for pretty much all of our UV and texture work at this point. Here are some screengrabs, and a shot of the reckless in game once we finished up!

Have a great Easter, gang! We’ll see you again soon!

Cheers,

The SnowCastle Games team

Making of Plumpet Islands

We were not quite happy with the design of the previous harvesting island (see blog post). Problem with the design was that it was not scalable enough. We intended to add lots of stuff along the way, but the shape and size did not support this. Our Art Director did some new design sketches…

Although this design did make it more intuitive what the player could do, it was still not modular enough. So he made another where he split the different sections apart into separate islands.

This was a much better design for several reasons. We can now add new islands as we se fit. Also note how the harvesting island and mountain are built by combining simple rocks. We began to make pieces and assembled Plumpet Island (the island with the windmill above) and Barnacle Bay.

 The house will be replaced with another, but we have simplified the production process without loosing visual quality.

In the previous harvesting island we made before christmas, we had the barnacles grow in the garden, but seriously – barnacles grow in the turf. With the new design we spilt spud production and pearl production (ammo for each Spud gun and pearl cross bow).

Both the mountain on the beach above and the island walls of Plumpet Island are constructed based on 7 different rock meshes. We have used Unity’s vertex paint shader to enable the green grass texture on the rocks.

That is it for now…

Hey guys! Quick little update from me here. I did the polished version of the Crabler from the last post by Frits as well as the production art sheet that Hans Kristian will be working from. Enjoy!

This week we looked at how to design and implement variations of each creature type in FoM. Instead of having a gazillion kinds of cannon-fodder, we have a few carefully designed creature types that really adds interest to the battle system. So e.g. the Crabler is one organic creature type with an aggressive and defensive behavior pattern that requires the player to use specific strategies and choose his/her abilities and pairs wisely.

As you can see below the Crabler will have different looks and weapons depending on its level and element type.
This “armor-sets” or attachment modules will all work with the base rig and mesh of the creature and lets us add a lot of variation to each monster type.

Next time I’ll go into some more detail on the production art and the whole 3D translation process.

Have swell weekend!

Spent most of last week working with both the content and visual design of the monsters for our desert outdoor environment! We had an original design for an armor plated lion-like beast, but decided to save that design for a boss battle and start fresh.

The Desert Armor Monster has two modes in combat – defensive and offensive. Its element is Earth and it is the only desert creature vulnerable to fire.

I ended up with the design below – the Giant Rock Crabler. It fits the desert environment, easy to read, not too hard to animate and looks both intimidating and cute at the same time.

These spider varieties were inspired by the adorable Jumping Spiders. I really liked the look of the four big eyes, but the whole quad legged design felt overly sci-fi and did not fit the desert. The Spider just ended up goofy-looking which is not what I wanted. The creature had to look brutish – big, lumbering idiot of a monster!

The Horus giant design. This is where I got the idea to place the armor on the front arms/legs. A gorilla like giant with an eagles head and giant fists of stone was overly far-fetched and would be hard to animate. I think it’s important that the concept of a fantasy creature is easy to read – both visually and conceptually – soooo this one was a no-go!

The first designs I did. We quite liked the Pokémon-ish scaled dog, though it did not fit the requirements for this particular creature.

Well I better get back to drawing monsters. If you have any brilliant monster ideas feel free to share them in the comment section.

Hey guys! Friday art post! I just finished this enemy design for Festival of Magic and wanted to show you guys! It’s pretty large, constantly flying and it can swoop in and give Amon an uppercut with that nasty horn. We’re working on a new environment where this guy will be an encounter. Frits is doing the system design for him now! Can’t wait for Hans Kristian to make the 3D model and animate this sucker!

Modeling sheet and texture variation suggestion:

Other than that, you can vote for us for the Indie of the Year (IOTY) award over on IndieDB! It’s super easy, just follow the link below and click the big old banner on the top saying “Vote for this game” at the top of the page!

Indie of the Year voting link.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Hey everyone! Just wanted to sign off this Friday with a peek at what I worked on today. we have started planning a new area for Amon to explore, and it’s got to have some enemies, right? We’ll be back with more on what kind of environment it is and such at a later point! Until then, have a look at the little guy below!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Hey guys! I just finished up this design, and wanted to show you a bit of the process behind it.

This crossbow weapon is a design for one of our main characters, it’s going to be seen a whole lot so we wanted to nail the design. We ended up going through 16 iterations before landing on the final piece.

First up I usually do a bunch of silhouettes to get the masses down. After these were done Frits, Hans Kristian and myself gather round my screen and discuss what we like/don’t like about them.

I had this idea that the first one looked kinda front heavy to I added all these counterweights by the handle. Which looks cool, but it brings to mind a rifle or shotgun very easily. We wanted it to be a single hand weapon, so a solution would be to make the “body” of the crossbow hollow.

I took the first thumbnail and iterated on that and came up with the next few. I’ve defined the masses a bit more with these seeing as how we know we’re on the right track now.

After another discussion and lots of pointing around the screen we landed on the one with the “check mark” by it. There were a couple more tweaks that happened while rendering it out as well, but nothing major. Now I can’t wait to see it translated into 3D and see it in game!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Hey guys! Long time no post! We have something cooking that we are super excited to share, but we can’t just yet. Next week!

In the meantime, I finished up this crossbow concept  that one of the characters will use as a main weapon and figured some concept art would sweeten the waiting!

I give you Brave Slinger! (cue drumroll)

Hey guys!

We wanted to share some visual progress with you guys. We’re hard at work on our vertical slice, and as Mattis showcased in the last post, we’re greyboxing the levels to prototype functionality early on. Parallell to that we’re working on assets, textures and all that good stuff to replace the grey boxes as we get them done.

I have a couple of steps along the way to show you.

After game design have made their decisions we paint up an environment to inform how we want the 3D assets to be made, as well as guide lighting and textures down the line. Here’s a concept I did for the very first room the player gets to see:

This is a typical environment concept art sheet we give to the environment artist. Separate elements, whether they’re tileable, units width and height and so on so there is as little guesswork as possible down the pipeline.

Below is the scene after we’ve gotten it back from our awesome 3D environment guy, Thomas Pasieka, with textures and wireframe and a uniform light .

This is after we’ve gotten all the 3D bits and pieces back and have reassembled them in Unity. For me, this is an awesome step to see my concept art come back as building blocks and then assemble it into something dimensional where the player can move!

And finally I have a screenshot from one of our designers playing around with lights and post processing effects. This is work in progress of course. We’re hoping to have some gameplay videos up before long as well, where we’ll have gotten further on the lighting too.

I’ll end this post with the concept art for the next part of the first environment, which is almost complete as well.

Thanks for looking! Hope you guys enjoy the updates!