Behind the Scenes: Kingdom Scrolls environment atlas (Patreon)

All the art for Kingdom Scrolls was done from scratch. There's actually a lot to talk about here, but for my first Patreon post, I'd love to talk to you about the one of my favorite parts-- the static environment art. I'm really happy with how everything turned out and I'm really proud of having done everything myself. I'm glad I recorded some screenshots early on to share with you!

The Kingdom Scrolls game as it's published today is actually the second iteration of an idea I prototyped about a year ago. Back then it was called (and it was just called "Untitled Kingdom Manager" or something like that). The idea was pretty much the same-- walk up to the King/Queen and read the scrolls. It didn't look that pretty, I just re-used the same "modular" wall and ceiling segments that I used in the "Winter Ball" world from two winters ago.

For the "real" iteration of Kingdom Scrolls, one of the first things I stepped back and redesigned was the floor plan and how I could make it perfect for the game mode. Since the world would be made of modular castle walls, pillars, and windows that snapped together, it wasn't super important to nail this right away, but I think I did a pretty good job.

The first floor plans involved a sort of hallway leading into a small throne room. Playtesting made it immediately obvious that this was a really bad idea-- I learned that people naturally form a sort of line as they wait in turn, and anybody who didn't want to roleplay would congregate around the throne itself. There was also a weird "scroll dispenser" area that was tucked into the corner, but it turns out that scroll retrieval is a really big deal in Kingdom Scrolls, and more floor space was definitely necessary (especially with more than 4 players or so!) For this reason, I went with a more or less "one room" floor plan.

Except for the small "closet" off to the side. I'm glad I put this in as just a random throwaway idea, it turns out people like to use it for all sorts of roleplay stuff, either to change avatars secretly or pretend it's a "jail cell" or whatnot.

When possible, I like to model thing in modular pieces. The Winter Ball gave me a rough idea of how tall and wide the walls should be, but windows were an entirely new thing. These segment size I settled on was 4.5 meters across. Getting the scale right early on is pretty important, especially for VR. Even though you can scale stuff in unity, having consistent scale for the entire workflow keeps the visual style consistent and saves a lot of hassle. Especially when cutting holes for doors, windows, and stuff like that.

I modeled the individual modules and cut together the texture atlas pretty much at the same time. For some of the more detailed parts, like the trims and engravings, I put the texture in the atlas first and then made a model that fit the various spacing and curves. For the rest, especially the large surfaces or tiling surfaces, I did the model first and then mapped the texture to make sure I allocated enough space on the atlas.

Why go through the trouble of making an atlas? Not only is it super optimized to share materials/textures (even if they're really big like 2048x2048), it makes editing stuff like color and grime a lot easier. I sampled lots of different textures into the atlas, so it was a little tricky to make sure all the stonework had a somewhat consistent hue and saturation. Having them on the same canvas helped with that a lot. And toward the end of editing, I could apply color changes to everything at once with just one filter, or overlay a layer of consistent dirt/grime to make the stone look older and give larger patches of brick more detail.

I wanted to make the floor have a trim that matched the shape of the room somewhat, so I waited until I knew where all the doorways and gameplay objects would be first. But in the end, the floor and wooden doors are kind of just lazily thrown together anyway. They're not modular, they're stretched weird. But at least the floor tiles nicely, which can be tricky when you're using an atlas. With a normal tiling texture, you only need to map one part of it and it will repeat nicely, but since an atlas doesn't work like wrapping paper at all, I have to put together a grid of smaller squares. It's a few more polygons, but in the end it saves a material slot.

For pretty much anything art related I love to show and tell. If you have anything specific you want to see the behind the scenes for, send me a message here on Patreon or on Twitter (@vr_jar) or through the Discord server.