Dev Diary - The Reikland Factory

In this issue, Lead Artist Russell takes us through the process of creating artwork for our newest Scenario: The Reikland Factory.



RvR is the core of this game. This is illustrated by the fact that the game facilitates making a new character, queuing into a scenario at the tender age of rank 1, and putting fools to the sword. You could easily gain the first 10 ranks of your career doing just that. I love the idea of people experiencing RvR before the T4 campaigns. Nobody shows up late to the party at rank 40 and says, “Ok, what’s this RvR noise about?” The war should be felt throughout your time spent here.

Thus, when the Live Team was tasked with creating post-launch content in the form of scenarios to complement the new classes, I was pleased to be a part of it. To any who are interested in reading on, I’m here to provide an overview of the art process involved with creating the scenarios, and profess my great love of cake.

The Reikland Factory

In the coming weeks, we’re introducing a new Tier 4 scenario, the Reikland Factory. It’s only going to be available during the Heavy Metal event, so be sure to check it out! This scenario is a battle for control of Reikland’s industry capability. The forces of Order have sailed north up the Reik River to meet the war host of Destruction, which is making a move to take the place over. Whoever gains control of the Factory dictates the region’s war machine production, moving the front lines closer to the gates of the enemy. Let the melee commence!

Concept and Prototyping

One of the reasons we chose to set the scenario within the bounds of one of Reikland’s factories was that we hadn’t yet shown the heavy industrial slant the zone has. Our Art Director was keen on communicating the yummy industrial belch of Reikland, so it became our starting point. From there, we adapted it into the 4-point capture game play mechanic of this scenario.

One of my goals going into this project was to make the bandwidth we’d consume worth spending. We’re traditionally pretty tight on download budgets, so this was an important point to me. To that end, we minimized recycling art from the launch library. This meant the artists all generated new assets, which they were happy about. It also helps with the “Wow!” factor, so people don’t take one look at it and say, “Well, this is just pulled from stuff they already made! Boooooo!” I think we can all agree a reaction like that is not one worth pursuing. Making new art is a win-win in these situations, because we like making it, and the user base is expecting new content when they are downloading it.

The construction began in earnest once the core design was roughed out. We knew our basic layout, and we began by first blocking out the zone’s scale and capture points. This is a baseline zone arrangement that we were able to give to the concept team. They then turned around and presented us with the imagery for the Factory based on the layout provided and everyone got a little excited because it was the first time the image in everyone’s head became a collective vision. After that we began a back-and-forth with the concept team as they refined the drawings and we refined our prototype geometry in tandem. The process ended up being different than the usual, “Here’s a drawing, now make it happen in 3D!”



Here’s the Reikland Factory as viewed from the Destruction side; they spawn behind the bridge. Order spawns near the pier further down the river. Both sides then run towards the main structure where things quickly turn sour. It is rumored that, not only are some of the Empire’s most powerful weapons of war produced here, a very tasty cake was secreted here only this morning.



This shot is rotated 180 degrees from the previous one (as a visual anchor, you can see the covered bridge on the right this time). This drawing represents what was hidden from view in the image above it. We could find no trace of the cake back here either.



This sketch shows one of our side buildings. One of the things we wanted to do was not simply wall in the players with a literal wall. In this case, a small stable serves to bracket one side of the scenario’s play space.

You might have noticed these drawings are not in color. In the case of this scenario, we do not require color concepts for Empire structures. The game has over three years of Empire imagery, so we have a huge library of color-corrected/themed images to draw on. Further, all the artists had previously done work on other Empire structures, so there are two layers of familiarity occurring that rendered the effort redundant. These drawings did a great job of telling us what we needed to know, and allowed the beleaguered concept artists to move on to other tasks.

Continued in next post...

 

Art Execution

At this point we had all the starting elements, and it was time to produce the assets required. We had the main factory structure and all the satellite structures detailed, and we knew the layout the zone would have, so we were at last ready to create the in-game assets.

We had our grey box prototypes, and so the process continued by developing those roughs into full assets. During production we met with the designers to make sure things were not deviating from the vision. There were also continuing sessions of feedback with our Art Director, and walk-arounds with the Lead.

Fast forward to our initial deliveries, and here we present the Reikland Factory!



Here’s a shot of the factory as we executed on it. I took the shot from an angle similar to the one in the first concept for comparison.



Another shot of the factory, this time resembling the reverse angle seen in the second concept drawing.



Here’s a screenshot showing some interior play space showcasing some switchback stairs. This is inside the factory itself. Notice all those great edging highlights. Oh! It’s better than finding cake, I must say.

Conclusion

So that’s a quick overview of how we built the in-game art. Truly it takes a village to raise… um, a factory, as the old saying goes.

I would like close by applauding the artists’ efforts; creating the art on this particular scenario was stressful (I’m leaving out the woes we had to deal with, but they do exist), and the results of their labor are stunning in my opinion. The scenarios that follow are shaping up to be just as great.

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