City of Steam Developer Journals - Art 2012 01 12 news

Art Dev Journal

2D & 3D:

We’ll be continuing our highlight of our favorite creations of 2011 with another segment. In the past you’ve seen what we’ve completed and how it went from design to concept to model, but today we wanted to show that development isn’t always easy. There are a multitude of designs that are rewritten, concept art crumpled up and thrown away, and models re-done over and over again; amongst the many problems that exist in this field of ours.

We’d like to feature a concept that was redone nearly completely that may have never got the honor of being rendered on webpages across the globe. We just lazily refer to it as Black Ghost.

As you can see it was aptly named!

We even got as far as modeling it and creating the SFX for its shrouded figure. Unfortunately in what may have been a fit of rage (or carelessness), that was deleted so all we have left is this really rough looking model. Oh the joys of development! We all really liked it and were sad when it was canned. It is understandable though, it doesn’t have a true steampunk feel to it as well as the potential problems with rendering and costs etc.

Then we came up with this new version that fits the bill as it seems. Another floating metallic summon. It’s quite nice but we still wanted to see that shrouded figure appear in-game!

The one other aspect we wanted to emphasize is that all of this is going into a special summon attack. That’s right, this little floating shell is summoned, strikes the target several times and with some extra nice flashy cool colors and then disappears. All of this goes into an effect that lasts just over 1 second in the game. Another interesting aspect is even with this redone model and look we aren’t even sure if it will appear because of the same technical issues that befell the first version, Black Ghost. I think that gives everyone a bit of a look at what some in the industry refer to as the 95%: The percentage of time one spends pushing through and getting things done, but not necessarily enjoying every moment. We do like what we do, we like the input that we can bring into the game but there are circumstances that are not as fun as others!

We’d like to hear what you think, should we push Dave to let us remake this shrouded Black Ghost? Maybe it will get picked up again and placed somewhere else in the game. Post below, or on the forums!