Hail Elyrians!

It is, once more, that most shiny of days! As usual, I figured I'd talk a little about what I was doing today and how that relates to some aspects of the game. But for that to work, I've got to have some shiny image or video to share, so let's start with an image:

That, my friends, is the conference room. It is the place where Caspian, Vye, myself, and the rest of the team gather for meetings or, for the purpose of this post, review what's been worked on lately.

Generally, when we implement something, we implement it first in a very rough prototype form. That's usually with little or no graphics or -- where graphics are necessary -- with what the industry affectionately calls "programmer art." Which basically means we use placeholder art put there by the person who implemented the feature. Here at SBS, programmers aren't the only folks who implement features, so it's a little unfair to still call what you see at this stage programmer art, honestly. But, it is what the industry calls it.

Anyway, when you get lucky, even the programmer art looks OK, but it's almost always nowhere near shipping quality. For example, one of the things I was looking at today was the basics of the knowledge system, which are in the game now. It's all programmer art, but some of it doesn't even look that bad:

There comes a point, even in a test client, where programmer art isn't going to cut it. Either it's because the programmer art is just so clunky you can't get a sense of what the feature really feels like, or because you're beginning to transition away from your game client being a testbed and more towards it becoming something you're actually going to show to someone. At this point, the real artists take over. In some cases you get the real final art, in others you get what amounts to "better placeholders" -- art built at the level of fidelity you need for your game client's purposes and no more.

In our case, we're more the latter than the former -- we don't want to bog down the art team building UI for features that are still in flux. However, the art still needs love, so we ask them to implement placeholder art in question at the same fidelity level of the game client. (In our case, that means UI art that fits the same minimalist aesthetic that the 3D assets use in our alpha client)

A good example of this is the character creation screen. I believe we've shared the "programmer art" version of this in the past, but here's what it looks like with "Alpha art:"

That same sort of look and feel applies to the inventory and other character management screens as well. Though, in the next example, you'll see instances where we both have alpha art and where we still have some programmer art in view.

I'm not really a huge fan of the dev time lost to reviewing, but it's a necessary use of time, all the same. Especially as the lead designer; review time for me is a chance to make sure everything is moving in the right direction, and a chance to see that features are doing what we expect them to. And, honestly, it's a time for the team to S H I N E, which makes a day like today a perfect day for reviewing, don't you think?

Stay shiny my friends!