Over the past few months work has continued on Gelebron’s tower and its deadly inhabitants. Previously we showed you some mock ups of the tower interior, the early building blocks we’ve been using to get a sense of scale and scope of the tower and the spaces needed to house the gameplay that we’re planning. Since then we’ve been adding some colour and detail to these blocks to add atmosphere and narrative elements that will give the tower its very own character and feel. From early tests in the office we’ve got some really nice looking interiors waiting in the wings that will really give a sense of progression as you fight your way through the tower and we hope to share some screen shots of these with you soon.
In the meantime, with the release of the Hallowe’en event (Exec’s note - I hope you’ve been enjoying squishing those spiders. Ugh, I hate spiders!), the designers and artists have been turning their thoughts to the denizens of the tower and their layout. We’re conscious of the fact that there’ll need to be a progression, not only across the individual floors so that you face an increasingly difficult challenge, but also over the levels of the tower. As well as creating some new enemy types for you, we’re also making variants of them as well so you can easily identify the new challenges as they present themselves to you.
We’ve got a great mix of enemy types in the works for the tower, some human and some…not so human ;-) Today we’re pleased to be able to reveal one of the new types that will be kicking your a**es once you get in the tower!
I asked some of the team that helped create these new mobs a few questions on their creative process.
First up was Jon the concept artist responsible for the initial designs;
What was your inspiration for these guys?
“I’ve drawn inspiration from the classic idea of a sentinel or guardian of “secrets”. In a fantasy realm, the statue that comes to life thanks to magical intervention is a very cool concept that motivated me to shape something never seen before in our game. The most challenging part was conveying the feeling that the power of Gelebron was imbued in those gigantic creatures.”
From the original brief what elements of your own did you bring in?
“Before achieving the final result, the concept phase of the character went to different and strange places, it looked nothing like it does now. We weren’t completely happy about it, so we kept working on it and an idea came to mind…”what if we make him match the architecture of the tower, what if he looks like he was meant to hold up or be part of a bigger structure”? And then the Statue took a very interesting turn and became what you can see.”
From concept the character then goes to our modellers whose job it is to take them from a 2d image to a 3d model. Mattia is our go to modeller for characters and I picked his brains a little.
How do you create a 3d model from a concept?
“The first step is to examine the concept and try to figure out what is the best approach to translate it in a 3d model. There are a lot of “cheats” in a 2d image and not everything can be directly translated into 3 dimensions. It also important to consider for which platform the asset needs to be created. Very often complicated patterns and fine details which look great in the concept need to be simplified because on the small screen of a smartphone they will just appear as noise.
There is of course a lot of talk with the animator and the art director. Once we agreed the way the character is going to move, I make sure that 3d model is designed and built to serve this purpose.
Once I’ve made all the necessary considerations I create a rough block out of the model. Having volume and forms in place helps to establish a solid foundation. It doesn’t matter how many fine details you add, if the character is not balanced at an early stage it won’t work. Once I’m happy with the base I proceed to create a high detailed sculpt . This will be used to extract all the details for the in-game version of the model which is composed by a low amount of polygons in order to not impact the engine performance.”
What challenges do you face when making a model?
“On mobile the budget for textures size and polygons count is quite tight and the key to create a good model is the efficiency of the assets. With this particular model the main challenge was creating a fair amount of variations without producing too many textures. I put a lot of thought on how I could re arrange elements in order to cover all the variations required by the design team.”
A character of this scale and dimension should have a very distinctive way of moving so I asked Chris, our animator, how he achieved this.
How do you create a suitable animation set for the creatures and characters we see in Celtic Heroes?
“I guess this would be determined by the class of character. Any npc that would be considered a ‘baddie’ would require a standard walk, run, idle, attack and death. Variations or augmentations of the attacks and idles would depend on the level of the said character. So one might imagine the ‘alpha’ Living Statues with special attacks and Idles to match their grandeur."
Where do you take your reference from?
“As with all these things, it all starts with the concept. Luckily we have very talented people here so I knew we were off to a good start on seeing the brilliant early concepts for the Statues. These steered my influences towards conceiving slightly more autonomous versions of Guillermo del Toro's Golden Army. As seen in Hellboy II.”
How do you find reference for a guy like this that has no exact equivalent in the real world?
“Reference would come from looking at similarly constructed creatures or objects in the real world and trying to merge these concepts. So in this case, for the Living Statue, I thought of a Great Ape/Gorilla and a Tractor Crane! I then married these two very differing concepts to create something appropriately threatening/structural and otherworldly.”
These lumbering giants will be just one of the adversaries you’ll be facing in the tower and they’ll come in different varieties not only in terms of level ranges but also offensive and defensive capabilities and of course they’ll need some they call “Boss” to look up to J It’s pretty exciting in the office at the moment seeing some new mobs come to life in brand new environments especially when we see these guys stalking the corridors and rooms of the Tower.
When it comes to events we’re not resting on our laurels; the team have put together some great plans for a Winter event and we think you’ll be blown away when the cold weather sets in.
The Beta continues to improve after a relatively quiet period. We’re seeing some great improvements in performance and stability when it comes to the lower-end devices and we’re confident that the release will happen sooner rather than later. Wouldn’t that make a great holiday present? ;-) We’re eternally grateful to our Beta testers for participating and providing great feedback as well as being available for the recent spate of Raids we’ve run.
A big thank you must also go out to everyone who entered the recent poetry competition. Each time we run a competition we’re amazed by the sheer number of responses and the creativity that people show. Well done to all the winners and keep an eye out for new competitions soon.
Until next time, fellow heroes! (Exec note – Kill those spiders!)