Scene Contest Update

Some time ago, you picked the winner of our scene contest. We added consequences and advice to the entry, and commissioned Jan Pospíšil to paint the illustration. Here is his pencil sketch, and the scene as it will appear in the game.

We are still testing other new scenes — we’d like version 2.3 to be a significant update. This means it’s not ready yet. But all the scenes are written, so we hope to say more fairly soon.

Art Constraints

We always like hearing player suggestions. Several of them will be in the upcoming 2.2.1 release, and we encourage you to send them in via our bugz email. (Not only does this go into our tracking system, but we can ask for clarification if necessary.)

One suggestion came in an App Store review: “Illustrations depicting the existing special combat events where certain nobles receive the favor/ire of the gods.” This would be cool, but it really isn’t practical.

When we created King of Dragon Pass, we wanted to make a game with a lot of replay, and also a game that a small team could create. One approach to the former was to randomize player personalities. Each game, the woman with the hat will be a different person. One time she may be extremely pious but stingy. The next, a xenophobic poet. We figured part of the game’s charm would be learning about your playing pieces through their advice and actions.

So when your book-loving ring member makes an extravagant purchase, it won’t always be the same person doing it. It could be any of the 70+ faces. And of course, people age during the game. To keep that manageable, there are three ages for each face. We didn’t want to draw 210 versions of the scene (or have 210 overlays, especially since this wasn’t the best fit for the ink and watercolor art style). So the art direction was to avoid showing any of the clan ring. (There are a small number of exceptions, and if you’ve won the long game, you’ll know how we typically resolved this.)

Back to the suggestion: combat interactions are focused as much on the potential hero as the situation. It’s true that many of these would not require 210 versions (most of the women would not suddenly be blessed by Orlanth), it would still be impractical to do dozens of versions of an illustration.

Could we come up with art direction that would allow for the various situations to be illustrated, but not show the principal character? Possibly. But the situations weren’t designed to work under this constraint, and many would be hard to portray. Here is the prose from just one battle situation:
[x = 1] text: The <otherClan> warriors see their chance and prepare to rush <ourHero.null><him/her> in a group.
[x = 2] text: Several formidable enemy warriors converge on <him/her>.
[x = 3] text: The enemy warriors nearest to <ourHero> step out of sword-range for a moment and laugh at their chance to take <him/her> down with superior numbers.
That’s really three different images.

In some cases, there’s an obvious illustration (e.g. an enemy flying over the battlefield), but because we wanted to enhance replay, this is often not possible.

It’s certainly possible that with enough effort, we could come up with the right illustrations (or simply do more of them). But I think the word pictures that Rob Heinsoo and I came up with do a reasonable job. We varied the text to give a different feel than the typical interactive scene (which allows for reflection and discussion by the ring members rather than a snap decision).

So the good idea of illustrating battle situations is at odds with the goals of maximum flexibility and reasonable cost. Perhaps some day we’ll have a way to implement it, but for now, we’re going to apply our resources to adding new story content instead of enhancing existing content. More on that in a future post.

Art Process

I was going through the files and ran into some work sketches, which we usually didn’t save. So I can show a bit of our process for creating art.

King of Dragon Pass had three separate art styles (plus interface art), so there wasn’t a single process. This is the basics of how we worked with Stefano Gaudiano to create artwork relating to the present (as opposed to the Otherworld or history).

A scene’s writer (usually Robin Laws) would come up with basic art direction. I (David Dunham) might expand on it, and pass it off to Stefano as Art Director.

R257: A prosperously-attired female carl from the Prosperous Clan (R90) comes to tell us of an attack on her cattle by a fearsome creature called a walktapus. A walktapus is a humanoid creature with an octopus for a head; its skin is mottled and wrinkly like an octopus, but it walks on land. The walktapus has attacked a typical shaggy cow and has its tentacles wrapped around the beast, while carls from this other clan look on in horror, too scared to fight it.

Stefano would get someone to make a loose thumbnail sketch in pencil. (These varied in size; the ones I found were 3 to a standard sheet of paper.) This served to make sure the writers had communicated to the artists, and as a quick way to iterate the design. Elise Bowditch and I reviewed all the thumbnails with Stefano. Sometimes there were small changes (to bring out important elements of the scene, make sure that there was room for text, or emphasize something interesting the artists had come up with). Unfortunately, I don’t know who did this thumbnail.

Once the thumbnail was approved, Stefano assigned it to an artist to create full-sized (9 x 5 1/8 inch) pencils. We’d get these by fax, since there usually wasn’t much discussion at this point, and we could usually give feedback by fax or verbally. Again, I don’t know who did the pencils for R257.

When the pencils were approved, Stefano inked them, then gave them to a colorist (Mike Christian and Brian Sendelbach did most of the coloring). Note that this scene is in flashback style, where the event occurred in the recent past.

Stefano would then do any additional work (such as adding the embroidery on the woman’s overdress). He scanned these images and sometimes made color adjustments or small edits with Photoshop.