Dev diary - Our amazing castle cross-section art (Patreon)

In a previous post I talked about the prototype I made for our "manor" (castle) screen, but I also wanted to talk about the art itself. As you can see, it's pretty incredible. It certainly wasn't cheap - but I can confidently say it was a huge bargain!

Upgrading the manor

The piece is broken down into layers, so that the rooms can be upgraded as you progress through the game and the manor will change to reflect these changes. We also designed it so that the layers of foreground and background would be separate, so that it can shift on the zoom to create a "parallax effect" that makes the whole thing look sort of 3D.

Above I've shown how the manor looks when fully upgraded, cleaned up and rebuilt to the height of its glory, but that won't be the case when you start playing - you and your maids will need to work hard to get the manor to that beautiful state from where it starts:

I mean... it's still an awesome castle, but it's a bit of a pig sty, right? That's going to need some elbow grease.

It's a big achievement

This was a huge project for our artist, Gil. The piece needed to be so complex that we could zoom into each individual room and have it work as a mini-background unto itself. We needed an extremely talented artist for this and so we were very lucky that Gil was available.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this took a lot of work to make. The fact that we have this done, along with a lot of other stuff, should probably prove that this game is already well underway, even if the playable parts of it aren't that far in yet.

My feeble sketch vs a real artist's sketch

To give you an idea what Gil had to work with, here's my concept sketch (humiliation at my lack of art skills incoming in 3... 2... 1...):

Now, this wasn't actually supposed to look good, of course. I was just outlining roughly what we needed. We then had a bunch of conversations about how this would work, what else I might need, etc, and I made it clear that this was only a rough guide and Gil should feel free to change things as he needed to.

Imagine how I felt when he returned this sketch to show me what he was planning.

We took our time

This game has been in pre-production for a long time precisely because I wanted to give the artists loads of time to work on the characters and the environments. I didn't want to be too hard about deadlines and I knew a lot of this would take some time.

Well, it did take a lot of time, but that wasn't a problem! That's allowed us to very carefully put the team together and work on all aspects of the development in detail.