#20 – RUSTED FOREST

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Last week, we showed you how we create characters for the game. Many thanks for all your comments here and on Discord! It feels great to know that you also appreciate smaller details that are so important for us. And this week, we’d like to share our process behind creating the art for biomes.




When you play Spire of Sorcery, the whole world of Rund is yours to explore. You can send your parties to any point on the map, though some points will prove hard to reach (for example, Catacombs surrounded by Swamps) and some will prove too dangerous to explore (for example, Castles controlled by the Empire).

Once you explore a certain area, you can always hover over any of its parts to access basic information about the biome. Knowing biome types is useful when planning expeditions: cutting through Ancient Forests or Battlefields may take a lot of time, and also presents risks specific to these areas – so maybe traveling by road over Plains or crossing Hills on foot is a better solution, as even if such route will be longer, it still will be faster and safer.

We currently have 20 biome types, ranging from Forests to Waterfronts, and from Caves of Eternal Darkness to Black Pools. Each type must have its own artwork that communicates the atmosphere as well as delivers additional details of the lore.



Since Rund is an original world, for us it is extremely important to make sure that the biome art transports you to the right universe: for example, something as simple as a village can look rich or poor, idyllic or beaten up, relaxed or on the defensive, depending on how the villagers in Rund generally feel about their life and the threats of the world outside. And it falls to our concept artist Rita to express our game designer’s vision with each such piece. Let’s take a look at how we created artwork for one of these biomes – The Rusted Forest.
 



The work begins with a brief that our game designer writes. Some biomes prove more difficult to describe than others, especially those that are common to many worlds (forests, hills, caves), because with Rund, we’re looking for a very specific interpretation of these concepts. Other biomes are much easier – because they are unique to Rund (such as Distorted Lands) and have a wealth of specific details that we can fall back on.

With the Rusted Forest, the brief went like this:

Rusted Forest is an area inside the Distorted Lands. It’s a zone that used to surround the citadel of an ancient mage who developed sophisticated magic machines and mechanisms. This zone used to be full of traps, including huge metal spears that shot up from below the ground.

Currently, almost all of the traps lost their power, and the area is covered in rusted spears, often covered in remains of gigantic monsters who attacked the citadel before the Cataclysm. With time, these spears got covered in moss, while the ground became tinted orange with rust. Wherever cracks appear on the surface, one can glimpse parts of old mechanisms – gears, levers and other parts of once powerful machinery that powered the traps.

 



Based on the designer’s brief, Rita came up with this set of references:



A reference board is a quick way to align an artist’s vision to that of game designer: we keep looking at different pictures until everyone agrees that some of these are “relevant” to the new work that’s about to be created, at which point we lock down the reference board and proceed to preparing the first sketch.
 



The first sketch is equally useful for showing what we want to create, and for showing what we do not want to create: we try to eliminate unwanted elements from early on, as well as to identify that “something is missing here”. Here’s how the first sketch of the Rusted Forest looked like –



We liked the menacing feeling, but we found it lacking a few things:

• Not enough overgrowth
  
• Missing the remains of the gigantic monsters
  

The next sketch addressed these issues:



The team agreed that Rita was on the right track, and she moved to creating the first sketch in color.
 



Color is important to any art, and for Spire of Sorcery’s art style colors do carry an additional meaning: all of our locations have their “key colors” that help to differentiate one biome from another. Why? Because the global map shows all of these biome types to help you plan your expeditions, thus it’s important that you are able to immediately distinguish, say, Ancient Forest from a regular Forest, and Plains from Hills.

The first color sketch of the Rusted Forest looked like this:



We felt that it works well for the overall atmosphere: clearly, the place is abandoned, and bears signs of past attacks where monsters were confronted by mechanical traps. At the same time, we also felt that it would be hard to distinguish the Rusted Forest on a global map from other biome types that relied on blue as their key color: namely, the Ancient Forest and the Distorted Lands. And so, Rita went on to create another color sketch –



We liked it much more.
 



Following the color sketch that we all liked, Rita started to develop the final artwork. This involves adding many more details as well as balancing the overall colors. Here’s one of the versions, which we thought to be a bit too much on the red side:



One thing that you might notice, is that at this stage Rita also increased the exposure of the parts of trap mechanisms, which were less visible in the color sketch. After several revisions, we’ve got even more details:



With this version, everyone in the team was pretty happy – except for one thing: the horizon. In the game, the Rusted Forest covers a pretty big area, but here it looked like it ends pretty soon in the distance, and the empty horizon suggests a desert stretching behind. Thus, we made a minor (yet important to us!) change, making sure that the image represents the actual in-game area –






After creating the final version of the Rusted Forest, we had one more task left: making the artwork game-ready, which in this case means preparing this art to be used in combination with other assets.

In Spire of Sorcery, a major part of gameplay is about reading the reports of disciples who return from their expeditions. And whenever something happens – a meeting with another party, a discovery, or a battle – quest log shows the biome where it happened, the object that is present there, and the characters or creatures who interact with your party.

Rita had to prepare the Rusted Forest for a possible combination with other objects that could appear in the foreground. Here’s the first test that showed how objects may possibly fit on this background:



Picture 1 shows the Rusted Forest split into 3 areas: background, and two foreground parts. Pictures 2 and 3 show how the Ruins and the Death Altar may possibly fit (we used these to run the test, even though in the world of Rund, neither can be found in the Rusted Forest since it’s so deep in the Distorted Lands).

To make the art ready for being used in combination with other assets, artists often have to prepare versions that look like this (in our case) –



And here’s a combination of background and object that you may actually meet in the game: The Anomaly (something similar to our world’s black holes) tested against the Rusted Forest.






Lastly, what happens next is that we have one more issues to tackle: creating sound effects for each piece of art. All of the sound effects for Spire of Sorcery are created by our long-time professional partner Anna Fruit. Perhaps in one of the upcoming blogs, we can talk about the specifics of her work (she’s set to produce several hundred original sound effects for the game, after all!) – in the meantime, here’s how the Rusted Forest came to life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA1H3rXDflA

With this, we end this week's dev blog, and as always, thank you for your interest in the game! Please join us on Discord if you would like to participate in the weekly Q&A sessions with our game designer, as well as to see work-in-progress materials that we regularly share there!



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