Dev Diary #59 - The Art of Rise from Ruin

Greetings fellow stormchasers!

This dev diary is a collaboration between myself (Elle) and Alex, 2D Artists at Triumph. That of course means that this sun’s rising we will show you how we created the art, aesthetics, and visuals for Rise from Ruin!

Image description: Astral Barrens event image

As you may already have noticed, Rise from Ruin is more than just ‘a desert expansion’. Along with some desert love, it introduces apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds, finally posing the question of what Age of Wonders 4 looks like when magic has gone terribly, devastatingly wrong.

The very first thing we explored visually for this expansion was the environment. As Bas told you in his earlier dev diary all about the Astral Barrens, we wanted a new terrain type consisting of sand and mountain features that was entirely hostile to magic and magical beings.

Image description: Early concept art for the Astral Barrens

Exploring the visual direction, we kept coming back to themes of wind. Similar to how river erosion formed the Grand Canyon, our antimagical landscapes suffered violent desert storms, shaping everything from the rocks to the trees.
Based on these themes, our Environment Artist Sara dove into the creation of 3D assets. Even the smallest details matter when selling a story, such as the right terrain texture:

Image description: Early terrain texture tests

Among all of these tests we found one that perfectly represented the erosion and wind movements:

Image description: The final main terrain texture

To properly showcase the damage left behind by cataclysms and the devouring winds, we also wanted visible scars left behind in the terrain, so Sara experimented with decal assets:

Image description: Spiral ground decal tests

All of this was really starting to come together, but still needed to be brought to life. We like to do this with movement, in this case through our VFX Artist Ana adding some epic effects:

Image description: Fractured trees and mana fracture spread VFX

Image description: Mana fracture in a tactical combat map

Speaking of bringing a world to life; we needed to tackle what types of creatures live in the Astral Barrens. It is clear that nothing truly thrives here, but which creatures can survive at all? Introducing our new Fractured Wildlife!

Image description: 6 new fractured wildlife units

Pale and hollowed out from the draining environment; these Fractured creatures cling on to life with an endless hunger for magic. Hungriest of them all is the Tier 5 unit: The Fractured Dragon!

Image description: Fractured Dragon sculpt

Image description: GIF of Fractured Dragon in-game

And because we are dragon enthusiasts as much as many of you, we’ve added these same visuals as Pantheon customization options for your dragon ruler (assuming you own Age of Wonders 4: Dragon Dawn).

Image description: Fractured Dragon pantheon customization items

If you’re less of a dragon enthusiast but just like the look of the Fractured Wildlife in general, this expansion also adds a new Fractured Major Transformation that gives your units the same insatiable hunger.

Image description: Fractured Major Transformation

Naturally, Rise from Ruin also features some less corrupted creatures. The Scorpion and Sand Worm wildlife units required more iteration than the rest, being important units for the themes of the expansion.

Image description: Sand Worm concepts

Image description: Scorpion concepts

Finally, the new wildlife comes with some epic new animations and FX too, one of our favorites being the very floppy Sand Worm Earth Tremor!

Image description: Sand Worm ability animation and VFX for Earth Tremor

All of these new creatures need someone to rein them in, so it’s finally time to talk about the new culture!

To survive this magically wrought wasteland and fight (or flee from) magic-sucking creatures, one will need to be mobile. With the complex gameplay design of Nomad culture’s moving cities, they also became the first culture where the visual design of the city was arguably more important than the design of the units.

Many questions needed to be answered regarding these moving cities, and many different visual approaches were considered for the design. Early ideas included cities moving on the backs of giant creatures, or the cities themselves becoming giant moving machines like in Mortal Engines. Where animals felt too nature-aligned and machines too materium, there was one option that felt much better with this chaos culture: landships!

Image description: Early concepts of the tents and ships

Blending the ship and city believably proved difficult. We initially played with the idea of the Nomad city being a camp built next to their parked ship:

Image description: Early idea of what Nomad cities could look like

But what proved far more interesting was the idea of an entire city being packed and unpacked; the same city directly created out of the ships’ wood and sails.

Image description: Final unpacked city concept

Image description: 3D Blockout of the city tiers, unpacked and packed

With this idea solidified, we moved onto polish. We wanted to make sure to keep the ‘tent-y’ feeling of the Nomad city when it packs up into a ship, resulting in a unique sail shape:

Image description: Paintover of the 3D blockout model & polish notes

These shapes were also reused for the tents in the siege map. You can see how much more “Nomad” character was added into the tent designs overtime:

Image description: Original blockouts vs later models

Image description: Final assets in a Nomad siege map

Finally, we added distinct details to the ship itself depending on which subculture you play.

Image description: Two variations of the ship’s bow

Image description: Two variations of ship sail textures

We found the sail textures especially important for the Nomad culture. For a people who carry everything they own with them, their sails would likely carry a lot of that history too. Thus we added functionality to show the secondary player colour in the city, greatly increasing customization.

Image description: Showcase of both player colors used in city textures

Image description: Nomad Siege Map

With the city now taking shape, it was time to look at the Nomad units. The visual notes we knew we wanted to hit were: low magic, cloth, light-weight materials, and craftiness. Based on these, all three of our 2D artists played around with vastly different directions:

Image description: Early Nomad exploration concepts

This is a great way to get the widest possible amount of ‘answers’ to our concept questions, quickly ruling out what does and doesn’t work.

Image description: Later Nomad concepts

Some strong visual patterns continued to reappear throughout our exploration: highly functional weapons, lightweight discs used as armor, and weighted frills on the ends of cloth. We liked these because they did a great job of highlighting the utilitarian nature of the Nomads.

Using this visual identity, a thumbnail lineup was made:

Image description: Thumbnail lineup of the Nomad culture units

A visual distinction was made between the subcultures: the conqueror subculture leans more towards the “raiding” land pirate theme, and the scavengers more towards a “survival” fantasy Mad Max.

Image description: Final concept sheets for Raider and Strider units

Since cloth is prevalent in this culture, we also dove deeper into iconography and created flowy, wind-inspired patterns to use on all kinds of surfaces.

Image description: Nomad culture pattern sheets

As an example of how these can be used, you’ll find the main emblem (a stylized mix between a compass and a sun) on the Nomad subculture tomes!

Image description: The Nomad subculture tomes, Conquerors (left) and Scavengers (right).

You’ll also find the patterns in 3D assets such as nomad weapons, armor, clothes, etc!

Image description: A Nomad Faction with final assets

In order to make the mobile nature of the Nomads shine, we needed some new animations. Highlighting 2 units in particular:

The new Wind Warrior shield unit has a lightweight deployable shield, allowing her to swap between defending and running around the field. 

Image description: Wind Warrior Defense Mode animation

Secondly, the Champion shock unit, who is able to swap stances between 2 types of weapons!

Image description: Champion unit Storm Strike

The Champion got some particularly aggressive animations; slicing through the enemy front lines.

Image description: Champion unit Wind Strike

There were a lot of form ideas that suited the themes of this expansion, but hares stood out above all. Partly because of their agility and mobility, partly because of their connection to chaos themes (Watership Down as well as Monty Python and the Holy Grail live rent free in our heads).

The challenge with these guys was offering a wide variety of player fantasies, and not just “cute and fluffy” (though we definitely wanted that option too!).

Image description: Concepts for the Harefolk form

Offering different options for faces, ears, hair, skin decoration, and even horns for the jackalope option gives this form a ton of customization. They got unique ear animations too, a passion project by our intern Alina!

Image description: Harefolk ear animation in-game

Excluding the culture tomes, Rise from Ruin introduces three new tomes!

Image description: (Left to right) Tome of the Warband, Sand Stalkers, and Warlord. 

Tome of the Warband is for those of you who want to harden your units through fierce battle. In order to get this feeling right, your units can take the Bred for War transformation, making them visually bulkier and battleworn.

Image description: Bred for War transformation in-game

And since the tome is very much focused on physicality, the spells look more like a manifestation of power and fury rather than your classic magics.

Image description: Commanders Call spell

The Tome of the Sandstalkers is for those who yearn to be one with harsh desert environments and wield them as their weapon. Since we’ve already covered the Scorpions and sand critters, let’s talk about the Dunestalker minor transformation!

Image description: Early concepts and sculpt

Sedimentary rock layers have super interesting patterns, ones we wanted to incorporate into the skin decoration for the Dunestalkers transformation. Add some swirling sand VFX on top and- bam!

Image description: Dunestalker transformation in-game

The Tome of the Warlord lets you overpower your foes with infernal might, using the new Warlord and War Golem units at your disposal. We wanted these units to feel interconnected, as though the same metal plates were used to create both armor and construct.

Image description: Concepts for the Warlord and War Golem units

Image description: Warlord and War Golem units in-game

We’ve rambled enough at this point, so let’s run through some last bits of art with fewer words!

The new UI skin gives you a little tent of your very own. :3

Image description: UI Skin assets 

Icons!

Image description: Compilation of new icons

This expansion isn’t short of free update content either. On top of gameplay changes, the Scorpion update introduces our favorite free update feature yet - the color picker! As is often the case in game development, this was far more difficult in practice than in theory. Our intern Jan worked on it full-time for 5 months, so everyone say thank you Jan for the free RGB monstrosities you can now create!

Image description: In-game Screenshot of the Color Picker (and subsequent eyeburning)

Speaking of freebies, if anyone is due for a new wallpaper, you’ll find all of these attached to this dev diary! Find them here!

Image description: Preview of the attached wallpapers

And to finish us off, I couldn’t help but include some beloved out of context art bloopers. Making art is serious business :]

Image description: Various art silliness from this expansion

If you’re craving even more art: we, as usual, have compiled our favorite works of the expansion into an ArtStation art blast, which is out now! Find it here!

As a final treat you can find the making of the Rise from Ruin key art timelapse video below:

Thanks for sticking with us, and we hope you enjoy playing with the new goodies in Rise from Ruin!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3976440?snr=1_2108_9__2107

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