All posts tagged with "art"

Dungeons of Dredmor has not been an easy baby to deliver in terms of art direction; The core game art was a patchwork of assets produced by a handful of artists over several years before I ever showed up.

Now it’s never a simple thing to corral multiple artists on one project. I went to art school so I know how difficult my people can be, to say nothing of the generally unreliable world of small-time freelance video game artists.  Original art direction was done by the fearless beating heart of Gaslamp, the Mr. Nicholas Vining, whose past travail I probably don’t envy. But he is merely a programmer of humble means; I inherited the job of creating a unified artistic direction for a largely unfinished game made of a diverse set of assets drawn by artists I’d never even talked to. With that, I have had to set a stylistic tone for the game that I could stand to look at, work on, and which could be completed in as timely a matter as possible.

It’s comforting to imagine an ideal situation in which I can art-direct the look & feel of a game from the ground up, everything perfect and in place, well planned and timed, with simpering sub-artists to do the boring parts (the next game, I tell myself, the next game). But by necessity Dredmor became a matter of what I could save of the original artwork and what I would redraw all by my lonesome. It’s been a practice of artistic triage: some sprites shall live, some must be left to die. Game features had to be expanded or added or attenuated or even cut outright based on what my artwork could do with the old artwork in a reasonable time-frame.

Much of what had to be decided came down to what I could draw most easily. My strength lies with drawing GUI assets, items, tilesets, and background splash paintings. Animated sprites, on the other hand, I’ve avoided like the plague due to a bit of a case of burnout on the previous Gaslamp project over a matter of a few hundreds of frames of character animation that we won’t speak of again.  Still, some new or revised animated sprite work may yet be necessary and time heals all wounds.

So far we’ve retained the original animated characters drawn by Bryan Rathman and Tim Wexford — and one by Jon Wofford, if my information is correct. Daniel Harris drew the original UI art and background paintings, Anthony Joas drew some of the original items, and Tim Wexford also drew the original tilesets … all of which I’ve almost entirely displaced with my own redrawn UI, items, and tiles, though in many cases the design direction of the original artists is strongly evident.

And let me not forget to thank the multi-talented Nicholas for his programmer art. Every dungeon, after all, needs a foundation.

In all, I hope that my efforts will present the best artistic product possible from a drawn-out, confused, and altogether educational experience.

old and new menu backgrounds

old and new dungeon tileset

Ahoy!

My name is David Baumgart and I’m the art guy here at Gaslamp. As such, I’m going to show lots of cool pictures unlike the boring text everyone else is going to post.

To start this off, I’d like to talk a bit about eyebrows. Yes, eyebrows! — In particular about how the eyebrows of the protagonist of Dungeons of Dredmor have evolved into the fearsome beasts they are.

The hero and most of the characters in Dungeons of Dredmor were designed and drawn by Bryan “Falthorn” Rathman who now works at some game developer called “Blizzard” or something, which means we’ll never, ever see him ever again.  From what I hear (he did this work before I joined the team),  he took inspiration from the stylized characters of old Lucasarts games, and you can see something like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle in the whimsy of his work. See here the raw hero sprite, standing:

From Bryan’s sprite, I’ve done various splash screen paintings for the game. My interpretation of the character has evolved as time has passed (as has my digital painting skill, no doubt). It’s not always been easy, because his distorted style is unlike what I’ve worked with before. Every artist has their ways of doing things;  As I’ve done freelance art for video games, I’ve had to work in styles set by other artists before I’ve arrived on the job, so a degree of flexibility is necessary and even a bit of provocative fun to prod me out of my usual style habits.  Have a look at this collection of clips, paying particular attention to the eyebrows:

In that last image there, the eyebrow thing starts to take on a life of its own.

I was trying to liven things up a bit there; Dredmor is rather a silly game that deserves a spirited hero with equally heroic eyebrows. In truth, aside from trying to capture that sense of whimsy, the eyebrows came about as a matter of how to fit exaggerated facial expressions into the various small UI images. See here:

These are a health indicator, a couple skill icons, and an achievement (which, upon closer inspection, lacks the over-the-hair exaggeration of the mature form of the Hero’s Eyebrows).

I’ve drawn comics before and have found that you have to give each panel a reason for existing — a gag, or at least a mood. Obviously UI icons are a bit more subdued than comic-panels, but as the spirit of the game demands, ridiculously huge eyebrows have turned out to be an excellent device for making the Dredmor hero an expressive character all his own.

[And about last week: Remind me to never again do the web dev guy a favor and finish off his scotch. It doesn’t end well.]