Road to 1.0
Once We’d successfully run our Kickstarter campaign, development really started to heat up. The team was growing and the overall vision of the project was becoming a lot more clear. I was really starting to stretch my legs as an artist, and I felt a lot of confidence to try some really out-there stuff. Having a steady stream of lore coming my way was incredibly helpful as well, as I could use a lot of it for jumping-off points for NPCs and environments.
While all this worldbuilding was going on, I was still doing a ton of content churn for stuff like gear and enemies. A lot of the Kickstarter rewards were also very art-focused, so I had those to bop through on top of my regular responsibilities. I was probably most active on the forums around this time and did a bunch of fun forum-only art and just goofing around with community members.
With most of the early and mid-game story content done, we had to come up with a satisfying story conclusion to the whole experience. It was around this time when I totally lost the plot on the world lore. It was very cool and intricate, full of all kinds of complex webs of alliances and political intrigue, but I was so caught up in the visuals that I adopted a kind of “give me the absolute highest level gist and no more“ stance to the story department. I definitely wish I’d paid a little more attention cause it was super cool, but time was at an ultra-premium. A lot of the specs I was getting started to take a hard-turn into more sci-fi territory, which I was really pleased about since I’d been grinding on fantasy for the better part of a year by then and it was a nice change of pace. The new writer was also giving me a lot of really great specs for a more diverse cast of characters, which was also very exciting to me as I’d kind of capped out the number of visually distinct old white men I could possibly design in one lifetime. There was also a really distinct horror element sneaking into a lot of my work, which definitely stuck around well into the Reborn expansion, and led to some of my favourite enemy and creature designs from the project.
We were getting really close to launch, but I’d grown a lot as an artist over the past year or so and really started to feel like the look of the game wasn’t keeping pace. I’d been learning graphics programming in my free time throughout development, and with only a few scant months until launch I wrote this ridiculous pitch document to pivot the entire style of the game away from the facet-shaded look we’d been using throughout development to a cel-shaded look that would match my concepts more faithfully. I somehow got the OK and crunched right up until launch to convert all the existing assets to the new visual style. Once the game had finally launched, we immediately jumped into content and lore updates which meant a lot of gear and enemy designs on my side. The game at this point was pretty well received and was selling well, but a big game changer in the Oculus Quest was just around the corner.
