#19 – ALCHEMIST

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Welcome to this week’s Dev Blog! This time, we’d like to tell you a little bit about the process behind the game, and specifically – about how we create our concept art for humans and non-humans of Rund.



We’re a small development team (currently 7 people), which has a lot of advantages. Amongst these advantages is the opportunity to use everyone’s experience to make our games better. Anything that we include in our released games, is the result of our teamwork. Everyone at Charlie Oscar makes suggestions and offers feedback, and what you see in our games is there because at some moment literally everyone agreed that this is the best that we can deliver.

At the same time, there are 2 areas where we change the approach: game design and server technology. We believe that these areas are so specific and require such special knowledge and experience, that the feedback that we provide to our game designer and server programmer is no more than just suggestions, and they have no obligation to respond or defend their choices. This is especially true for game design.

A big requirement for any of our games is the consistency of its creative vision. Sometimes it comes down to quite unusual rules, for example in our previous game (Gremlins, Inc.) characters can smoke cigars – but cannot eat food or drink liquids, based on its lore. And so when recently someone in the team suggested a card that involved characters drinking wine, it was shut down by our game designer.

With Spire of Sorcery, the impact of consistency in game design is tremendous: the world of Rund is a complex system, with everything connected to everything else, thus any change and design decision taken has multiple indirect consequences. Take mutants, for example: most of us on the development team know a bit about them because of the discussions that already happened; but if you ask us, whether or not you may meet a mutant while paying a visit to a nearby village fair, we’ll refer you to our game designer, who has the whole world of Rund in his head, and who will know for certain.

In this way, we combine the Occidental and Oriental approaches to team work: for most production issues, we’re running a leader-less team process, where every person’s opinion counts; and for everything related to game design, we’re running a “king and his servants” kind of system where we never question the vision of our game designer, but rather see our ambition in helping him to bring that vision to life.





Our designer’s vision for Spire of Sorcery is to build from scratch a new, original world – the world of Rund. This doesn’t mean that we want to have, say, flying dolphins or two-headed horses – those would be “exotic” rather than “original”. What we’re after is a world that is free from pre-existing conventions and concepts, while being both captivating and believable, in order to take our players all the way to Rund.

Because the world of Rund is original, every piece of concept art that we create carries a lot of weight: this is the window through which you, the players, will see that world, and we must try to make it as close to the original vision of our game designer as possible. And today we’d like to walk you through the creative process behind one such piece of concept art: the Alchemist.



The Alchemist is a human character, a trader in rare items, whom you are most likely to meet in towns and in villages, though sometimes you may encounter alchemists in the wild – where they forage for their ingredients.

Once we discussed this character, our concept artist Rita came up with these three ideas:



Option 1 resonated the most with Alexey, our game designer. At the same time, he did not like “the wizard hats”, as he called them: they were out of place in this context. While members of the Guild of Mages are required to wear easy-to-notice hats, alchemists are just regular traders. He also highlighted the fact that the life of alchemist is not an easy one, from handling all the weird stuff that he’s selling to traveling around, and so his dress should be more worn-out. Finally, our alchemist is supposed to be an old man, but in option 1 he displays a posture of a young man. So, we should deal with this in the next revision, too.

The next revision addressed these comments, and offered 4 options to consider:



The hat is gone, the look is more tired (both in posture and in the dress). Now is the time to discuss what exactly the alchemist should be holding up in his hands. The book (no.3) wasn’t a good fit because there’s a separate character, Bookseller, who’s trading in these. The orb and potions (no.1, no.4) were not a good fit to the lore, either. And thus, we settled on the jar of eyes and a small precious bottle from no. 4 and no.2.




This version of the Alchemist everyone loved, and so Rita moved from creating an “idea” of the character to creating the actual line art for the concept.




Next comes the question of color. For coloring, we work with a dedicated colorist, Sasha, who takes it very seriously. She started with a few options.




Everyone on the team liked no.3 the most, and so we went on to work from that image further. We asked for the following changes:

• That the label on the small bottle (with precious liquid) be more like an old paper label, rather than a modern-looking full-color label;
  
• That the basket be more like in no.1, while the small leather bag be more like in no.2;
  
• That the eyeballs be less colorful, because while they may come from a wide variety of animals, they are still eyeballs in brine, and not snooker balls =)
  
• That the legs of an octopus-like creature from the lower bag be more like a freshly-caught animal and less like a dried/cured one.
  

Meet the next version –



Here, wanted to correct a few more things:

• The eyeballs became faded (good!) but we wanted a deeper color, as well as a more natural color to them;
  
• We really wanted the amulet of the alchemist to stand out, and here it was lost against his dress;
  
• The robe looked too simple in terms of color: yes, his dress is worn-out, and old, but at the same time it was really something when it was new – his profession is quite special, and he wouldn’t order just any regular dress;
  
• Finally, we wanted a more “sea-like” look for the tentacles from the lower bag.
  

And so, another revision happened:



We loved the golden amulet, and we loved the new tentacles, as well as a “richer” robe. The only remaining issue? The eyes in the jar were still not really authentic.

After this has been addressed, we arrived at the final version of this character – hurray!





Some of our friends are making fun of us for going through all these multiple revisions, and for including into discussions every member of our development team: does it really matter for our players, or we’re doing this simply because we are having fun in the process? =)

Our answer is this: we believe that the visuals are super important for Spire of Sorcery, as they communicate not only a particular gameplay value, but also open for you a window into the world of Rund. We have chosen to create the game in the current hand-drawn style because we love details, and this style allows us to add a ton of them to every single piece of art.

From such a small thing as the color of the eyes in the jar that the alchemist holds, and to such a big thing as the banner of the Second Legion, we strive to deliver to you the amazing vision of our game designer to the best of our ability. Like many of our players, we love to dive into new worlds, and we feel that our work on small details is going to make a lot of you really happy on the day when you launch the game for the first time!

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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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