Big game project – E.R.A – Eternal resonance : Arena

Hey, so i’m supposed to write blogposts containing my thoughts, processes surrounding this years big game project. I’m a second year student at uppsala university, campus gotland in sweden. I study gamedesign and graphics, my program is in majority about game design and secondarily about graphical art for games. I came here with a heavy interested in arts and didn’t really understand what game design was to be honest. I’ve come to learn obviously what it is and come to like it but not as much as art which really is my passion. I focus mainly on 2D but i’ve had a lot of 3D courses so i do 3D modelling and all that comes with it as well.

Back to what i am doing right now, since we’re second years we didn’t really have any restrictions this year in what kind of game we were allowed to do part from passing a series of hand-ins. Our producer / lead design presented a concept to me that i just couldn’t resist joining in on. The game is called Eternal resonance : Arena and i’d classify it as a MOBA(Multiplayer online battle arena) with a twist, part from the usual 5vs5 setup and creeps that spawns automatically and runs down their lanes attacking anything that comes in their way. Instead of this being automatic we have a 6th player that works as a commander, he’s playing the RTS part and controls when and how many creeps that spawn, part from this he can perform several actions such as; building new barracks, towers and use abilites. I’ve been a roleplayer since i was twelve years old and therefor when we came to discussing lore part of E.R.A i came up with a lot of ideas. I’ve taken a large part in creating the world for our game and designing creatures, buildings and heroes. Since i was the first graphical artist to be invited to work on this concept and since i usually have a lot of ideas regarding this i naturally became the lead artist on this game.

We’re three weeks in to the course right now and so far i’ve worked on creating the majority of our concepts, i’ll post some of them later in this post. I’ve done some modelling aswell; the towers in our game and the ranged soldiers as we’d like to call them, soldiers instead of creeps or minions as that’s what they are. But as mentioned i’ve created all of the concepts except for the melee creeps in our game as well as working on the lore for a bit. I’ve just spent one whole day on the lore so far though as i felt stuck in the visual design of our game i had to settle some things regarding that. Daniel, our lead designer and i worked on this for one day and came up with a cool base for us to continue working on. I will probably post some of that later on as we come up with more. I figured i’d focus this post on the graphical part as that’s my priority right now.

So this was the concept i created for our hero / champion that is simply called copperman. He’s a great hero amongst his people and is recognized by his armor completely made out of copper. We decided early on that humans in our world would be quite bulky. So i’ve been responsible of texturing this fellow something that has taken up a few days of my time before i found something i was quite happy with. I think i pressured myself to hard since 2D is my field and therefor i couldn’t come up with anything i was happy with. After a few tries and some guidance from Jonatan i finally came up with something that works. Part from creating this concept i’ve worked on a few structures, presented bellow;

These were created both as concepts and blueprints for the 3D artist that would model them. The one above featuring the platform on which our commander will stand on. Both top and sideview included.

The one above is a portal, in other games you would call these barracks. Since our battles are fought on floating islands far up in the sky it was more fitting to have portals that soldiers arrived through when the commanders calls for them.

Featured above is a generator that will be used to harvest one of the resources the human race will need; Electricity.

This helmet above was me trying out how creating a highpoly and then baking an ambient occlusion would work as a base for the diffuse. This is the helmet for our hero; copperman. This is not at all final but it will be something very close to this.
Part from working with the graphical part i have been overwatching and helping out the other graphical artists in order to get a as united style as possible.

Well this was my first post but certainly not the last for this course and since we intend to keep working on this game ever after the course is over this blog will probably be updated a lot and linked to our IndieDB page etc. So stay tuned people and follow our progress. I’m gonna make sure to have material ready for my next post, screenshots etc maybe even a few bits of lore. We’re really in to this game idea and we hope that you will as well. For more updates follow our facebookpage; https://www.facebook.com/EscapeRealityStudio

Over and out, Henrik Rosenborg