Behind the Scenes: Gold Mine Game Illustration (Patreon)

This week I wanted to continue the game asset illustration series, but it's getting harder and harder to come up with suitable ideas for buildings. So I had to do a little exercise and imagine playing a game. What buildings would I have to build? What purpose would they serve?

And of course, what settlement could you build without some proper resource mining? Every strategy builder game starts like that. Chop wood, harvest food, mine resources. 

I went ahead and searched for relevant references and images to find some inspiration.

Visit the full Pinboard here

It's not that I can't imagine how a mine in a stylized strategy game looks, but it's mostly about details. The references I found confirmed my idea of a mine - a clump of rocks sticking out of the ground with a wooden entrance built into it. But every one of them had something different, something special.

Different types of mine carts, different supporting structures or some operational machinery, lanterns, torches, candles, explosives. A lot of additional details like tools and supplies.

If I only counted on my own imaginations, or things I can remember by heart, I would probably miss a lot of these ideas and details. The point is not to copy, the point is to be reminded.

What I like to do next, is to crop some of these details out and organize them together in PureRef software, to heave a clear list of things I'd like to remember. With a list like that at hand, it's time to do some sketching.

I've blocked out a rough sketch of the rock formation with the wooden entrance, since that's the most dominant part of the design and played with different variations of the wooden structure. I liked the idea of having some planks over the entrance, that would make this design more vertical, with another level to stand on. And I really wanted to put the ladder somewhere :)

Another thing that caught my eye, was some kind of a machinery to help with loading and unloading of the goods. It was something that I saw on some of the references, so I simplified it to a simple crane structure with a pulley wheel. It also helps to make the layout bit more sophisticated and balance out the composition.

The rest was mostly about filling in the details, like the cart, some pickaxes and also the explosive barrel, that I forgot about while sketching. Luckily, I always go back to the board when I have the layout ready in 3D to see, if I can enhance it further or if I forgot some important detail.

You can watch the process video on Youtube