Week 1

During this week, our team focused on our pre production; establishing schedules,

determining what type of assets we needed, and what work tasks had top priority. After some discussion, we had determined that a we would create a "Boss-Rush" game. Boss rushes are action based, and focus on giving the player an engaging and challenging experience. As soon as we determined the overall structure and core of our game, the art team began conjuring different concepts for bosses, arenas, and styles to see what resonated best with the team, and the type of game we were trying to deliver on.

Early Concepts

During the early stages of concept art, the art team, inspired by Greek mythology, began to draw a variety of bosses and seeing which ones they liked. Along the way, the theme of Hero Relics became a running idea with the bosses in order to tell the player small snippets of the story. In the end we decided upon a classic Minotaur (Gaur, The Warchief) and a more original idea, an owl lady (Alba, The Deacon). Sundry Studios also had a stretch goal to achieve a third boss- a golem.

Concept art done by James Wei, Maya Sorvala, and Daniela Joo

Protagonist and Theme

Despite being inspired by Greek mythology at the start of concept art, the team decided that it would be better to direct the game's theme to one of medieval fantasy, however we still retain the string of Greek mythology with our bosses. With that in mind we fleshed out the main character of the story: a regular guy hailing from a ruined kingdom, driven by obtaining the ancient Hero's relics to save his kingdom and homeland.

Concept art done by James Wei

Additional Concepts and VFX

Soon after the concept art for the bosses was made, concept for their abilities and VFX soon followed. The team after some brainstorming, assigned a characteristic to the bosses. For example the minotaur is associated with war and combat, hence the heavy abilities and war banner related VFX. Meanwhile the owl boss is smaller and cunning, hence her use of magic in her abilities.

Concept art done by Daniela Joo

Prototyping and Whiteboxing

One of the first steps needed to unite the creative vision of the team was to create a level whitebox. White boxing is the process of using primitive shapes to understand the dimensions and scale of the world that we wanted to build. While establishing the Whitebox, the technical team prototyped the core features that would be used in the game to ensure that these features would work well to deliver smooth and engaging gameplay. At this stage, we prototyped level streaming, as well as some combat features to discover any nuances early on in the development stage so that they could be addressed in a timely manner.

Character Modeling

One of our talented Character Artists, Uriel, created a wonderful fur brush for Maya to utilize in creating distinct and visually appealing Minotaur character. The cooperative dynamic between Uriel and Maya proved early on that, everyone could put their hands on different elements of different models, and still have a visually-united art style. Further utilizing the dynamic between the character artists, Maya was able to hop on Uriel's owl model to tweak elements such as facial features and proportions to better match concept art. James' was working hard on creating a visually distinct main character, such as defining the silhouette and thickness of his model.