Art Direction, Adventurers, Assets (Patreon)

An artistic vision

The past week, our artists have been hard at work, taking the original game idea & vision of Guild Architect, and figuring out a solid 3D artstyle. The end result of this is what we call our coveted "Art Bible", a document containing all the information needed for an artist to understand exactly what the vision of the game is, and how to reach that. 

An example of this is the above snippet from the art bible, where the color palette and shading for our foliage such as grass, trees and bushes is defined. 

You can find the full art bible attached to this report as well.

Once this art bible was done, we got to the point of "paintovers", where we take a screenshot of how the current game looks, and then take the art palette decided upon in the art bible to draw out the final vision of the game, so we can easily validate the color vibes, and have an end goal to work towards. 

Lastly, with the artistic vision fully done, some first models could be made as well, to see how the the workflow would be to put these into the game. This isn't the final look however, as our shader (Quibli) hasn't been correctly set up yet, only utilizing the outlining feature, but nothing of the real anime-style effects.

Adventurers

Now having the prettiest guild ever is kind of pointless if there's nobody in the guild itself to begin with. That's where adventurers come in, one of our main types of NPC. Adventurers are a part of your guild, come and spend money at the tavern, level up their skills and take quests. 

To make it so every adventurer feels unique, they are based upon a bunch of core stats, similar to a D&D character (but using a different kind of classes). These can then be influenced with upgrading their weapons, experience from doing the right kind of quests,... and determine the party they are joining as well. We want every adventurer to create its own mini-story almost, where you can see the adventures it has gone on, and how those have shaped them as a person. 

Progress Grab Bag

Some smaller features/additions we implemented over the past week:

- We added a basic system for music so you're not stuck in the guild in dead silence

- We got a logo for our game (see below)

What's Next?

Next week we'll be focusing on the party system, which will be grouping multiple adventurers together and forms the core for actually sending out people on adventures. Once the parties are there, we can go even a step higher, and get to work on the actual quest-giving system, which will be one of the main mechanics and unique sellings points of the game. 

Art wise, our prop artist will be dropping out for a week due to an operation, leaving our concepting/character artist, who'll get to work on making some custom versions of our advisors, instead of the current T-posing Synty assets.