From the very first moment in art design and development for Vagrus, we knew that the game world's haunting, post-apocalyptic beauty is key to conveying the atmosphere we want to create. Of course, that may not be saying much, since most games today rely heavily on visuals, it comes with the genre. More specifically, the challenge was to convey the right kind of atmosphere and find the art style that is perfect for that. We agreed soon that cartoon-like or pixel art would not do, nor would any other more stylized imagery. We settled upon the more realistic, but painting-like look, which gives a feeling almost akin to observing an old and faded piece of classical art. The other challenge was that the world of Vagrus has been a living and detailed environment for a long time now, so often our fantastically talented artists have to follow very specific directions on certain elements of an image.

What usually happens, is that I create a very raw draft of the image, in black and white, and number important elements of it, like on the sketch above. Artists then use that as a basis for their interpretation. Note that some details are dropped from the sketches - for various reasons.

Above is the first version of the city's artwork, a concept phase, you could say. Almost all the most important landmarks are there, the positions are fixed, the scales are set. We usually have a round of comments at this phase, work out any issues we might have, and then go on with the details. 

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