More Monster Polishing

Continuing in the vein of monster reworks, it always feels good to go back and give that clean-up pass to monsters who have waited so patiently for it for such a long time.

Troygan the Enchanger is a big sentient machine of mysterious origins who talks to the heroes for a bit, and who you could theoretically walk inside of, if that sounds like your idea of a fun time. He was using the Morthagi "wardrobe" monster image as a placeholder:

But no longer! Well done, Troygan, your thousands of years of chugging away in that underground laboratory have finally paid off, and you have some real art.

The "wardrobe" art itself was a placeholder, and now that guy will probably get a redraw to look less like Troygan and more like its own thing.

(Edit: he did!):

Additionally, one of our top candidates for "Morthagi Boss," should we have one, has been the Grand Matron. Up until today, she had a respectable placeholder image.

See, you get the idea; you get what she's about. 

What drives her.

(Answer: probably a few dozen fiery screaming souls.)

But the time when we'll be releasing a beta version to players is... not "upon" us, but like... maybe a month and a half out? And three of those weeks are going to be taken up with various children being home from school and daycare, so who am I kidding, I'm not going to get jaaaaack done from mid-December to almost mid-January.

Point being, if I don't want embarrassing placeholder art in there, I'd better get that Wacom pen in gear now.

Ah, that feels better.

And our minotaurs, they're older than either of the above two. Their image was one of the first things we made, before any real style had been established, like 5 years ago? Because Nate and Doug decided that whatever happened, we wanted a minotaur in the roster. And you can just decide things like that when you make your own indie game.

And so he's sufficiently grumpy. But now we have minotaurs as the leaders (or at least higher nobles) in our monster group of the cave-dwelling cultists. So it was time to bring this boy finally up to date:

Bison it up. Get those tattoos in there. Keep those tusks though; they're workin' for me.

Drauven Revisit

I've got a special place in my heart for Drauven, even though in some ways they're our least "original" monsters (lizard-people have been done many times). They're grouchy and probably eat the occasional villager, but they're unapologetic.

(Also don't tell the rest of the team this, but they became my dumping ground for all of the things I would have loved to give orcs if we had orcs in this game.)

But after a while, they started sliding down the hill of "lazy artist falls back on vaguely tribal imagery," so a visual rework has been coming along.

Archers

Grunts

Brutes

Priests

I want to maintain their love of decoration—red leathers, shiny bronze, and etched patterns into their armor and weapons—and their predilection for bird imagery, without falling into the "primitive savage rawr" stereotype.

They're still one of the more "human" monster types you encounter (and that's taking into account that many Deepists actually are humans). There are a few events in the game where people negotiate with them or see a more vulnerable side of them.

But overall, they're ambitious, they're organized, and they'd be quite happy to take your spleen home as a souvenir for their kids.

Biome-Specific Ruins

We want some of our mission maps to eventually include ruins, because ruins are like the chocolate sprinkles of fantasy worlds, you just sow them here and there and they make everything more fun.

So I drew up a bunch of ruin-y pieces of scenery in a big Photoshop file, and they'll appear on the maps that are tagged with "ruins." And we wanted to try something new, where we make different versions of a piece of architecture for the different biomes that your missions can take place in (forest, field, swamp, foothills, & cave). So above the base group of super-boring-general stone ruins, there are a bunch of layers that mess with colors and add vegetation/fungi for each biome.

cave

field

foothill/mountain

forest

swamp

The result is a lot more separate files to save out, but I think the extra flavor will be worth it.

Environments and Scenery Upgrade

Our latest work on mission environments

This is a shot of SiteLab, the tool we use to iterate on procedurally generated mission maps. Previously our sites had some big limitations. Towers were always in the forest, and always had roughly the same scenery (furniture), no matter what tile they were on or monster was present.

We've taken the time to break all that apart, and generalize it, in order to give us much greater site variety, and in order to make sites much easier to work on/add in the future.

We've also added a ton of new furniture! biome specific furniture, monster specific furniture, and Station specific furniture, which varies depending on the kind of site you're at. Lamps. Set Pieces. Focal Points. Tons of good stuff coming in right now. Here are some quick work-in-progress shots.

Morthagi defending a Lumberyard they've infested in the forest.

Gorgons defending a Library (inside a tower) in the swamp at night. 

Drauven defending a Primal Altar in the hills

Thrixl invading a forest town at night.

As part of this, we made some big improvements to lamps, which are now interactive and have interesting interfuse abilities, and we removed the "beacon doors" we had before in the Cottage map, because they were confusing.

I'm really excited to see all the new environment variety coming together, and with all this new scenery we want to focus on adding appropriate interactions and interfusion recipes for it, so different sites should play differently, depending on what kind of scenery is available. Exciting times!

Wildermyth Alpha

We've hit alpha!

For us that means that the broad outlines of the complete game are present. All the major systems exist and function, the complete game loop is playable, and the overall high concept of the game is real, and can be played.

This is a big deal to me, personally.

So but, what have we actually built? What is this thing? Here's my stab at the high concept:

Wildermyth is a game about heroic character development and turn-based squad combat. As a player you manage a company of heroes whose goal is to keep the Yondering Lands safe for humankind. Your characters grow and change over time in response to events that happen in combat and in stories. Heroes you love go in to your Legacy, and they can be used in future playthroughs, so that over time you build up your own mythos or pantheon. 

That core vision has remained pretty much intact over the years, which always surprises me a little bit.

Now what? The game is definitely not finished, and we have a big list of improvements waiting, but the skeleton is all there. From here on, the focus shifts. We will spend less time building new systems, and more time refining, iterating, and responding to feedback. We will focus more on playability, balance, and content.

We've built the game to be as modular as possible when it comes to content. The downside is less authorial control over the player experience, but the upside is that the game can accommodate a probably very very large amount of content. Because of the event-driven nature of stories, and because the history/aspect/effect engine is so general and flexible, we think we can keep adding content pretty much indefinitely, and the plan is to do so as long as people are still interested in it (and it makes financial sense to.)

So, modding tools? User-generated scenarios and adventures? Unlockable stand-alone adventures for legacy heroes? We've got some interesting possibilities. It all depends on what the community wants to see. We'd love for this game to have a long life and we're willing to invest in it.

We'll send out an official alpha playtest as soon as we iron out a few bugs and playability issues. To be honest, it's not the build I will recommend that you start with. I think we're about to enter a period of rapid improvement across a wide range of player-facing areas. But anyway it marks an important moment for us as a team!

Deepist Thoughts

What kind of music should Deepists have? They worship minotaurs, so I thought I could take some inspiration from bull noises, and they are surprisingly musical.

This sweet track is my new jam.

Monster Furniture

In addition to the regular bits of art that break up our mission maps, we wanted to make some monster-specific "furniture" that would add some flavor to the battlefield.

Apparently skulls are super hot this season.

Asset Creation: Step-by-Step

Over the last few years, I've unofficially settled into a workflow of making the characters and scenery that goes into the game. Everybody has mostly the same types of outlines and shading, and I generally know what my Photoshop file is going to look like. But maybe you've wondered what the drawing process actually looks like.

Wonder no longer.

Everybody starts with a sketch. I wish I had gorgeous detailed sketches to give to you, but honestly, things rarely get more polished than this:

Homeboy's sacral chakra is hella blocked. 

Fun fact: sometimes I look back at my sketches and can't even figure out what I was going for.

?????

But once I think I've got it from here, we lay down the outlines. Probably redrawing the hands fifteen million times because hands are hard. And anyone who holds a swappable weapon may need to have the holding-hand and weapon be in separate layer groups.

Then we lay down the base colors (minus the separate hand group here), so that we know generally what color scheme we're in. Deepists have blueish skin, both from generations of being underground and also to conveniently distinguish them from goodie-two-shoes human types. ;)

The shading is another layer with a mask made from the base layer, so that I can go wheee with the brushstrokes and keep things contained. The shading layer is also set to Hard Light, if you know Photoshop and are into that kind of information. I've found it to be the best blend mode for keeping the colors looking the way I want.

There may be more layers for extra details that I don't want baked into any other layer. Tattoos, spots, stripes, woodgrain, highlights, etc. Anything that I want to be able to turn on/off or edit separately gets its own layer. I learned this lesson the hard way during a job where the art director would ask me to change the color of the highlights on a picture, and I'd give them a blank look, because I'd painted the whole thing into one gorgeous layer. Because I was used to painting with physical paint. So I had to redo the entire thing. Don't be like young Annie. Use layers.

Then we do the same thing with the weapon. In fact, the weapon here is just for show. In the game, the weapon is it's own PNG, and Nate tells it to sandwich itself in between the PNGs for this brute and this brute's hand, then to scoot and rotate until it the placement is right.

Ideally, we end up with somebody who looks like this in-game:

And he's all pumped to go get his ass kicked by some heroes.

More Comic Backgrounds

I could do these things all day. They don't take long, and you get the immediate payoff of a freestanding piece of art that you can plop into version control, feeling the warm glow of accomplishment. 

Unfortunately, there is other art to be done that requires more thought (oh god we're redesigning the Overland Map and trying to figure out how everything is going to look), so my job does not end at comic backgrounds and forest monsters.

Undergrounds of the earthen variety. 

Spooooky crypt. Monsters can't resist a good spooky crypt. They're drawn to it like hipsters to artisanal pizza.

Outside our living room window, I love that time of day when just the tops of the trees are lit.  

Spoooooky forest. 

A morthagi-building workshop. This is where the unspeakable horror magic happens!

"I'd love to go questing with you, but I'm swamped right now."

I realized that we have like twenty forest backgrounds and almost no rocky backgrounds.

Nothing ominous about a room full of treasure, no sir. Nothing at all.

* * *

Sometimes I lose track of myself and I end up making something that's less of a comic background and more of a mediocre attempt at an impressionist painting. The first draft of a "rolling green hills" background looked like this:

Even though I'm using sweeping lines and trying to keep things simple, there are a couple things not working here.

The sky is just too "standard," there's no stylization going on there.

And any time you have a background with a blue sky and green ground, get suspicious. Some people can pull it off, but more likely, your background is boring—change the color of something, anything, and see if it gets more interesting.

A second pass tried to get things more abstract and pulled the color palette in a bit (the blue is gone and the yellow has been desaturated). While it may not be as "pretty" as the first one, it fits with the other comic backgrounds better and lets the viewer do a little more of the fun inferential work.

* * *

Bonus: adding foreground pieces so that our heroes can stand on them and look out over the hills, brooding heroically: