Isometric scenes

With these isometric scenes it is sometimes easy to look at a zoomed-out design blockout or concept art and see things in simplified terms, but once you see how close the camera is in-game, you start to realize how much detail will be needed. Creating art for these scenes can be a time-consuming process for artists, especially with a small art team. For larger scenes, I’ll often break them down into distinct areas and work on things in manageable chunks. An example is the Underbelly area in Torment: Tides of Numenera. This was a fairly large level and it had a number of unique parts, a foundry, a shanty town, various merchant shops, and a mined-out tunnel area. Since each of these areas are fairly distinct from one another I will create separate asset lists for each and try to focus on one area at a time. This keeps me focused and prevents me from jumping from one random bit to the next, which for me is an easy thing to get lost in when dealing with a large level. I also make prioritized lists for myself because if I don’t I can sometimes get sidetracked focusing on some small details that I think are cool but are not necessarily that important from a design or narrative point of view.