In the last part of our character design series, we talked about what goes into conceptualizing and designing characters and touched upon how Bazsó came up with distinct the art style for characters and how Szonja raised the bar when working with the majority of them.

Now it's time to discuss what actually happens after the initial phase of concepts and moodboards. Mind you, this will probably have information that is well-known by any graphic designers who work on 2D character art; yet others may find it intriguing.

You may have noticed that Vagrus is pretty heavy on UI, being a strategy/resource management game and an RPG rolled into one. A lot of UI means a lot of buttons and icons, and drawing those is a challenge in its own right. Not only because of the size of the set but also due to the requirement of having them look right: easy to discern and to tell each apart from the rest.

In Character design - Part 1 we talked about the types of characters in Vagrus, focusing especially on Companions and their roles in the game. Now it's time to move onto the topic of what exactly goes into the graphic design phase of these characters.

A lot has happened since our last project update, so let's dig in without delay!

Expanding team

Beside Marci who has recently joined our ranks as an intern and is already working on implementing new features for the game in Unity + C#, we have also got two new writers checking out our self-developed event editor tool to ready themselves for mass content production once we plunge into that phase (right after publishing our playable demo). Rest assured that we will post details about them and their work when we get there. 

Well, we have been so busy that we skipped a beat in our originally planned monthly project updates. Which is actually good news if we are looking at it from a progress perspective. So what has happened since last year?

After returning recharged (and pot-bellied) from the holiday period we focused our attention on two things: 

• Creating additional graphic design capacity by finding more super-talented and like-minded artists to create environment and character art assets for us.
• Prototyping our hero combat to test its mechanics both in terms of graphics and game design.

The obvious intent behind choosing those focus areas was that we wanted to show more to our follower community on how the game is going to look like as well as display some of the game mechanics we're planning on using.

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.

So you have received some details about the game, the setting and could read the first part of our lead-in short story as well. Now let's talk about the project a bit.

Early steps

First order of business: we have finally incorporated. Yay! I bet in some countries it is a fairly easy process, a dozen clicks and within a few hours you have your firm up and running. Not here. The period from the decision to start the process until you can confidently declare victory over all the paperwork connected to incorporation could take up to a month. But boy, how good it feels when you are done!

With that we could finally order our new computers, printer, etc. Hoping those will all arrive still before the holidays, will sure be a heck of a Christmas gift for us. :)