Behind the Scenes of Eternal Warlords: Arena Art Direction

The smoothest part of the development cycle for Eternal Warlords: Arena so far has been the building of the art assets. Design began in October 2006 and the rendered frames of the animation were complete by January 2007. I attribute this primarily to the skill and work ethic of the contractor. As a first time art director, I had a clear vision of what I wanted visually, but I lacked the technical knowledge. This became apparent when we started integrating the animations into the game.

Most of the units have a 30 frame animation, give or take a couple. This comes out to a total animation time of about 3 seconds (play speed is .1 seconds/frame). A couple of them have a significantly longer animation, like the archer.The elven archer’s attack animation consists of ~50 frames and is about 5 seconds long. Without standard attack animation times, it made it difficult on the programmers to coordinate the hit and defend animations of the target unit. By default the target would flail or block before the archer even released her arrow.

The other area where my lack of expertise became evident was in the models themselves. If you remember the original models, they were full of exquisite details. When they were shrunk down during the rendering process to the actual size they’d be in-game, much of that detail was lost. What you see in the attack animations could easily be represented using simple shapes, saving the artist a lot of time in constructing the models.

There are plans for adding more units to Eternal Warlords: Arena throughout the life of the game. When we do so, the lessons I learned from creating the first 12 will be put into practice. I will also have those original twelve units redesigned using simple shapes and with standard animation times.