Art Direction: giving life to the Mediterranean-inspired world of Calderia

[h3]In today's devlog learn how the art team crafted the art direction for Great Houses of Calderia:[/h3]

"When it came to creating illustrations for this game, our main goal was to make the world of Calderia feel real and immersive. We wanted players to be fully absorbed in the game's history and culture, so our art designs were based on this foundation. To achieve this, our art team worked closely with the design team to bring Calderia to life.

Instead of relying solely on typical fantasy themes, we drew inspiration from real historical references. We also steered towards Mediterranean references and tried to avoid the central European and British look which we feel is more common in entertainment.

We also discovered that real-world examples often have the richness of practical functionality, psychological and cultural layers and making them further interesting and surprising than standard fantasy tropes."

One of our early fantasy concepts


"Throughout the process, we delved into various references and integrated them into our art style. Sometimes, we added a twist, but always with a foundation in Calderia's worldbuilding.

For instance, unlike often depicted, in reality, it would have been uncommon to wear armor outside of martial context. However, the period armor does look undoubtedly awesome and we wanted to display it often. Our approach was to incorporate pieces of armor in noble attire as a status symbol in Calderian society and explain this cultural quirk with the unconscious psychological factors surrounding the world's cataclysmic history."

Magistrate and Advocatus companions


"When making illustrations for the game, we have put effort into justifying our choices with world-building so that the elements in the illustrations would convey the rich history and culture of the world of Calderia. Some of the illustrations might depict a specific scene in the game, but sometimes they might be a painting, illustration, or a mural from the game world, sometimes even from another era, expanding the world-building on a meta-level and adding an intriguing visual twist."


Part of a mural created for our game


"During the development process the AI-generated image technology took huge leaps and we started to experiment with using this for some of the illustrations.

After a few months of experiments we found that with the right prompting, using mainly names of old masters, we could generate something that fits the game’s aesthetic without stepping on any living artist’s toes, including our own.

The process often involved quite a bit of curating, merging, and editing of the AI output. Having said that, there are also untouched generated images as we did not want to do a cursory overpaint (as seems to be the trend) just to make them appear handcrafted.

All in all, this allowed us to include much more imagery than originally planned, adding depth to the world of Calderia and allowing our small team to focus on more important issues relevant to the game. We want to emphasize that both human-art and AI-generated content is used in the event illustrations."

[h3]Click on the links to watch our artists work on early concepts and in-game portraits[/h3]



Join our Discord to get involved in the development of Great Houses of Calderia: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J

- Great Houses of Calderia Team -