We are excited to share with you some early insight into the development of the art for Age of Darkness: Final Stand. This is an exciting topic for our team as a lot of love was poured into developing the visuals into what you see today.
Before any real work on the project could begin, it was important for us to have some idea of what we wanted the game to look like. We developed a brief together defining what visuals we were aiming to achieve in our early concepts.
At the end of the world, the ground is damp with the stench of blood and rain. Flowers, Wildlife, all that was once living is now dead. Open fields of once green vibrant grass are now cold wet swampland. Even IF the darkness is defeated... it will take eon's before this land returns to it's past days of glory.
Of course, words are never enough and leave plenty of room for misinterpretation within the team. We spent a lot of time at this point also looking at references to pull from. Combining elements that we liked as well as our own ideas being inspired by the initial brief.
This is one of our first developed concepts for the game, already knowing a lot of what we wanted to achieve with the game play we kept the focus around how visuals would look from that perspective.
After developing a few images giving us a larger vision overview of the games visuals, we honed in on some more specific concepts. In today's post we'll be showing you those early exploration pieces for our Enemies and Buildings.
The nightmares of Age of Darkness:Final Stand have a consistent theme with our darkness as it's source. In each enemy there is a core where the darkness emanates, this could also be seen as there soul. Showcasing this across each enemy design is what's important in unifying each design. Below we have a few examples of our early explorations for different enemy units.
Buildings are the key component of every RTS, so ensure they looked appealing and on theme with our world is crucial. Taking the idea that our human faction has minimal resources to work with after the darkness tore through the land is reflected in our designs. With initial building tiers being built from large logs and thatch, as if they were built in a hurry, slowly working there way up to more fortified structures as better resources come available.
We finally managed to land on some of the core features we wanted from the design of our enemies and world, and its been long road from where we started to where we are now. Hope you enjoyed this short insight into our early concept exploration for Age of Darkness.