Every game needs a setting and Celtic Heroes is no exception. So far you’ve seen the rolling hills, the imposing sight of Farcrag Castle dominating the landscape of Lir’s Reach, crawled your way through the dank confines of Dunskeig gutters and fought the hideous denizens of Carrowmore Tunnels but how do these locations actually end up in your hands?
As we’re currently crafting a completely new environment for Gelebron’s Tower that we thought we’d share some info about the team that make the locations of Dal Riata and how we create the levels within the relatively confined space of handheld devices.
I fired some questions over to Kenny one of our 3D artists here at OTM Towers.
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How did you get started in game art?
I graduated in Interdisciplinary Design which ultimately ended up being pretty non-specific and useless. As a result, I was looking for a focus in which to apply my skills in Art and Design when I stumbled upon a funded MA in Game Art and Animation at Abertay University, Dundee. Funded MA courses are pretty rare so I jumped at the opportunity.
How did you get into OTM?
After I realised that there was a games developer in my home city I emailed the owner continuously for a period of around 6 months asking for any kind of studio experience, paid or unpaid, that they could offer. Getting any kind of job nowadays is really difficult as there is a lot of competition, you have to be persistent and willing to gain industry experience any way you can.
You’re currently helping to put together Gelebron’s Tower. What part do you play in this process and how does that fit in with the rest of the studio?
My role can be pretty varied because we are a relatively small team but I tend to focus on the Environment Art aspect of production. At the moment, I am currently greyboxing the gamespace for Gelebron’s Tower via a combination of 3DS Max and Unity. During this period, I am working closely with other members of the Environment and Concept team in order build early iterations of the new gamespace. These iterations explore many important aspects of the environment such as scale, proportion, player flow, level design and modularity, to name but a few. At regular intervals the Environment team will sync up with Design in order to check that what we are developing is in line with their vision of how the player will experience the zone. Overall, everyone’s goal here is to ensure that Gelebron’s Tower is well planned and gets off on the right foot.
Once you have an understanding of the area, and the look and feel you’re after, what’s the process of actually creating this? What tools do you use?
Once we are happy with the greyblocked environment we can then start to take those simple place-holder blocks and begin the process of transforming them into actual game assets. Currently, we use 3DS Max as our modelling programme of choice. All of the final geometry in the zone will eventually pass through 3DS Max at some point or another. However, we also use sculpting software such as Zbrush to model high level details which can be baked down into a texture. Textures will usually be finalised/refined in photo manipulation software such as Photoshop.
We then build the environment by taking these game assets and assembling them in the game engine Unity. This includes a multitude of related tasks such as level building, lighting, particle effects, environment effects, optimisation and polish.
What sort of problems do you encounter while you’re creating levels?
Optimisation. Getting any zone of substantial scale and detail to run efficiently on a mobile platform is always going to be challenging, especially when you consider the nature of the MMO genre. We want the environments to be epic and filled with quality but this requires constant vigilance and a plethora of smoke and mirrors so that your ipad/Galaxy does not melt under the strain. We constantly strive to find a balance between efficiency and quality.
As a gamer and an artist, what are some of your favourite games in terms of environments?
I actually love games with a more illustrated, simple and colourful style such as Zelda: Windwaker, Guacamelee, Fez, JSRF and the like. But, I also have a soft spot for the epic sci-fi worlds presented in games like Mass Effect and Halo. I love Studio Ghibli.
Are there any real world buildings or environments that you’d like to look to for inspiration?
Pinterest. I can’t recommend it enough, once you start to follow a few boards there is no going back. I’ve always enjoyed being in forests, there is something about the enveloping nature of them that is really relaxing and revitalising, sometimes it’s good to get out of the city and reset your mind. I don’t have many specific sources that I go to for inspiration but most of my ideas and motivation appear to come when I exercise.
Any advice to people want to break into game art?
As I mentioned In the first question, it’s really all about persistence, dedication and luck in the end. If I could go back I would definitely have chosen my specialization and direction as early on as possible because it takes many years to become proficient. Never be disheartened or put off by other people’s opinions because invariably they are useless. Stick at it and everything will come with time, it always does.
Cheers and good luck,
Kenny
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Thanks Kenny.
It’s interesting and very exciting to see these levels build up week on week and I’m sure you guys are going to love Gelebron’s Tower when you see it in all its glory. We’ll be seeing more of the Tower before it’s released but you’ll have to wait until release to discover all of its secrets. Very soon we’ll featuring a diary around the characters and creatures of Celtic Heroes.
Kenny also made some very interesting points there about persistence and dedication. I’m sure there are many of you out there reading this who would one day like to work in a games company. Please feel free to fire some questions our way on careers in the gaming industry and we’ll put together an article answering these as well as giving general tips on choosing and following such a career.
I hope that those of you with high enough levels are enjoying Carrowmore Tunnels that saw a release on Android this week. The next release is coming along nicely and there’ll be something to get players of all levels excited.
We’re at the heart of the ios build now as we’re concentrating on optimisation. We’ve had some great progress with the Destiny Engine (the code name for our new engine powered by Unity) on some of the older ios devices and we’re looking to improve it further. We’ll be running some tests soon on porting data to new servers so that your play experience doesn’t suffer when we release…soon…;-)
Talking of releases we’ve been thinking about other content for this year now that we have made such great progress on the Unity port. Some of these will be immediately apparent to you in the form of new bosses, quests and features but we’re also looking at some changes under the hood that will allow us to add even more depth and breadth to the current game. These changes will open up some exciting possibilities for quests and equipment especially giving you more reasons to visit Dal Riata.
Until next time, Heroes!