City of Steam Art Dev Journal - GDC Paybackl news

Repost from City of Steam Dev Journals

In our last dev journal we talked about the amusing cartoon avatars. This time we’d like to bring everyone’s focus back into the development side of things. We’ve been hard at work modifying armor concepts. Actually we had thought of refashioning the armors for quite some time but comments we received from GDC and the sneak peek pushed the priority up.

At GDC San Francisco we met some gamers and industry professionals, which quite bluntly expressed that a lot of the armor in City of Steam just didn’t feel like it fit in with the industrial age fantasy- too plain. They also had a chance to flip through Dave’s book “The New Epoch” and came across the Warder class and said that the featured armor should definitely be in-game. So we decided we could make some changes to improve the general feel and even add some of the altered older concepts.

So armed with quite a few players’ feedback, we set forth. This also led us to come across a few other concepts and designs that could be modified and overhauled to add into the game. Taking the aforementioned warder armor as an example; let’s take a look at how it got decked out.

(Warder Armor Male))

(Warder Armor Female)

Here’s another sample wicker armor that has been enhanced. The change is more obvious and, in our opinion, much more visually pleasing.

(Wicker Armor Original)

(Wicker Armor Modified)

Moving on, we also changed quite a few of the armor models. We were busy at work with improving a bunch of the models. While there is a definite improvement across the board but it may not seem so obvious with these poor perspectives…

We had intended to show this from several angles but ran out of time. From this you can at least see changes we made to the models.

Additionally, here are some nice side by side comparisons of some of the modeling work we’ve been doing after receiving the concepts from Charben’s team. Ooo even in-game captures:

(A male Gunner sporting some cool armor)

(A male Arcanist - dual wielding as opposed to showing off an awesome staff)

It’s always nice to show how things get funneled and often changed around from beginning to end. When we put these journals together, we get the chance to stand back and realize some of the changes that have occurred in a more pronounced light. What makes posting the in-game screenshots so interesting is that they represent the final result. What gets displayed has passed through so many different perspectives and limitations to arrive at what is possible to present.

Any thoughts? Do you want to see more of these concepts to 3D realizations? Please head over to our Forum to discuss.

Head to the Dev Journal Page to see more development of City of Steam.