Battle Arenas

We always start working on combat scenes after all the landscape scenes have been drawn, allowing us to understand exactly what will happen and where. All fighting scenes are divided into two large parts – plot and random events. The latter is drawn to represent some abstract area on the map, where they can occur, such as forest and steppe, deserts, mountains or forest-steppe. The plot ones are strictly tied to the scenes of the environment and are also described in the text.

Characters

Yes, there are 54 full-height dialogue characters in the game. I think that the most difficult part is the face and, perhaps, a pose. Those took the most time and energy. As in the scenes, it all starts with a text description. Then comes a succession of reference photos from Pinterest with individual elements for clothing or color. We also use a couple of absolutely wonderful books – “Fashion in the Middle Ages” and “Medieval Fashions” to work with the clothes of characters. If you look at this video – here you can see the whole process from start to finish.

From the very beginning, we decided that we would spend no more than 3-4 days on a character in order to do everything in time. And, to the very end, we managed to observe this, well, except for 5-6 characters, which we painted for more than a week – these are the main characters and several complex NPCs. I also talked about this process here.

Animation