Yulia (Patreon)

Greetings! Though I've mostly been working on non-art stuff, I did finish Yulia's character design and thought it might be fun to share. Yulia, as you may recall, is part of The Hell, the PvP guild who've garnered sort of a reputation as meanies and bullies. She's the only girl in the group, and plays a more prominent role in 0.10's long quest than most other members, with the possible exception of the guild leader, Savik. I was going for sort of a peasant look, since Val described her as a "homely peasant girl" when they met outside The Dark Pits. And I originally was going to make her less pretty than the others, but I found this vulnerable, waifish look really appealing and just decided to roll with it. The only concession to "homely" was her unusually prominent eyebrows, but I think even those are rather fetching!

Both Yulia and Savik are meant to be vaguely Slavic - Savik in particular was originally inspired by the "More dots!" guy from that infamous Onyxia video, though he's evolved quite a bit since then. I think the "More dots!" guy is actually Romanian, which I don't suppose is really Slavic... but still. It's just an inspiration!

Anyway, there's no plans to make her a particularly important character outside of this release, so she won't be getting expression portraits (which is good, since that can be a pretty time-consuming process). She will briefly join your party, though, so she'll be getting a single portrait, as well as a couple of character view renders. Thus, if you're ungentlemanly enough to undress her, you'll see her in her birthday suit... but you wouldn't do that, would you?

Mapping

3D art occupied some development time, as did writing, but about half the time since my last update has been spent on mapping. A good chunk of the long quest takes place in Plains End, which is supposed to be a small border town far away from the wars of the Orcs and Humans. I try to pay more attention to mapping these days, since I want the environment to feel... alive. If it's a town, I want it to be laid out like and look as though people actually live there. Or if it's outside, I want it to have interesting little places, spots for critters, that sort of thing. Mapping this town has been a bit of a challenge - for reasons you'll discover when you play, Plains End isn't intended as a place you'll want to come back to, so I don't want it to be too inviting or interesting. So I've had to restrain myself when it comes to mapping this place, but I plan on having a lot of fun with Ogremarsh's commercial district! (I've also been debating giving the rest of Ogremarsh a facelift, but I'm afraid it'll interfere with too many scripted scenes.)

It's taken a while, but the mapping's almost done - there's a couple of building interiors left, as well as a couple of outdoor spots. And once that's complete, I can get rolling with writing the next part of the quest. My goal is to be finished with that and to have some work done on the dungeon (the final part of the quest) by the next update. Some interesting things will happen there (and you'll meet an old... friend?) but the dungeon itself won't be particularly large. You won't see any big dungeons until you try to convince Bloodfist, the raiding guild, to help (tentatively planned for 0.12 and maybe 0.13.)

Well, that's all I have for you this time - time to get back to mapping! Hopefully you like Yulia's pic (even though I had some issues with the cloth.) Thank you for your support!