Jun 11, 2024

Dev Diary #32: The Art of Eldritch Realms

Age of Wonders 4 - fangirlcrazily

Sovereign greetings my Thrall kin, Art Director Rich Burgess here for another image-heavy thread of tentacles. Be warned of minor visual spoilers, don’t tread further if you want to go into the Abyss fresh!

For this Dev Diary I’d like to discuss the process of pulling this DLC out of the darkness of the Umbral Abyss and into the light. With some behind-the-scenes exploration and some technical processes.

Your Eldritch Sovereign Leader

I can't think of any games where you can customize your own monstrous Eldritch leader, so we had a lot of fun exploring what this could mean and look like. To start and hit the ground running we took the existing Lost Mage unit as a base and built on top of it.

Making sure the unit always floats and doesn't hold any weapons (albeit a Relic hovering in front) meant we were freed from many animation restraints and could really push the silhouettes and bodies of the leaders.

Tentacles are cool, but what other variations could we push? Folded moth wings instead of arms, a mermaid or sinew body, and insectoid legs, we tried to fulfill different eldritch fantasies. We started off with blue sky sketches exploring possibilities -

We split them into different categories so you could mix and match what you liked best. Do you want to be all about the tentacles, sure! Or if you want to lean into being a creepy mummy, we have you covered. Here we see some head and back piece explorations -

We then take those Photoshop 2D sketches into 3D using ZBrush and push the shapes further, here at the top left we see a head, back and body type all being worked on at once as part of an ‘obsidian set.’ We then split these into different sliders for you to play with. We also made sure it wasn’t all monstrous as that makes for a monotone look, you can also create beautiful monsters with merfolk bodies and petal motifs -

We never have a specific number of customization options in mind, we just keep going until we run out of time, much to the stress of our poor producers!

We then have a set of bodies that might move in different ways or have some unique hook. We spend some extra animation budget here leaning into those tropes to make sure the mermaid tail flows properly, the mummy cloth sways according to physics and the eyeballs look around and blink. On top of the customization assets we also added proportion sliders for head, arms, legs and wings. We also tried a different approach to skin colour by tinting it with 2 different colours that results in some really interesting combinations!

A few examples of what you can create, we can’t wait to see your beautiful monstrosities! -

On top of looks you can also choose a starting Relic or forge your own in the Item Forge, here we see the dodecahedron with our custom Rune font, seen throughout the game -

Or a gloopy flesh slimeball, notice how we really try to push effects and motion through our leaders and items. This really requires the whole team to pull off; a 3D artist, a tech artist, VFX artist and an animator -

As your Eldritch Ruler levels up, you can take them down different paths of your choosing. 3 things happen; firstly they scale up in size, a fully leveled up Eldritch Sovereign is comparable to a giant. Next they get new visuals, smokey PFX appear around their bodies with embers and eventually they gain a magical crown truly living up to their sovereign names. These visuals depend on the path you choose -

A magic Eldritch Leader wouldn’t be complete without new and powerful spells and hero abilities, here are a few examples -

The Umbral Abyss

For this fleshy DLC we wanted to lean into the heritage of Age of Wonders 2 Shadow Magic and bring back the much-beloved shadow realm, now known as the Umbral Abyss.

Your new realm layer is setup in the frontend and in-game can be accessed by none other than a tentacle entrance :) They are essentially portals to the other world layers or between other floating Umbral Islands. The icon above the portal shows you where it leads. Notice how the Umbral biome leaks through these portals, infecting other lands -

The floating islands of the Abyss contain a whole new biome to explore -

For this biome we created a new mountain set, mountains come with 3 different sizes and multiple mesh variation per size. Random rotation adds even more variation to the game world -

Other ambient details like eyeball bats spawn around forest tiles -

New Locations

We’ve added a lot of new locations to the Umbral Layer, from Visit Sites with fun visuals and properties, to powerful Nodes and a new Magic Material. We threw in some shiney Pickups to boot so the Umbral Abyss is a treasure trove of places ready to be looted. This gives the new layer a distinct feel and reason to enter.

Games are not a static medium, when creating new ideas we try to push visuals with the help of particle effects, shaders and animation. Motion is an added element that breathes life into otherwise static objects, and importantly helps with readability by drawing our attention to it. For instance see how we are adding motion to these new province improvements below -

Or here with the floating rocks, rising mists and runes of this new Monolith Node -

The cool thing about Visit Sites is we can have 2 states, active when you can go there, and cooldown after you’ve visited and taken whatever splendors it holds. It presents opportunities to add visual surprises like with the Quicksilver basin below -

The Umbral Illuminati are always watching… I wonder what happens when you visit this site…

Not only are there creepy things in the dark, but we made sure there are locations of safety that fight back against this darkness. This brings a visual contrast as you seek a heaven in the depths below -

Shield of light particle FX -

What other secrets are there? New visit sites, nodes and powerful pickups await.

Eldritch Dwelling

For this DLC we made the foundations of a new system that supports unique monsters as Dwelling Rulers. We might expand upon this system down the line allowing you to interact with wildlife Monsters like Giants, Ogres and more as they rule their own Dwelling or as recruitable heroes themselves.

The Eldritch Hive comes to life, with its own monstrous leader, what dark trades can be made here? Inspired by termite spires, and a nod to the Planetfall Kirko cities, the Umbral Dwellings act as the beating heart of the Abyss -

Eldritch Dwelling event and city background -

Umbral Tactical Layer

The biome also comes with its own flavour of vegetation, from trees to small plants. Shown here are some early concepts for trees, fleshy tendrils and twisted coral-like shapes. We have limitations so units can still stand around the base and use them for partial cover. You can see how the rough concepts got translated into 3D through iteration -

Here we see the vegetation in context of the game, with added motion through a combination of bone animation and shaders -

Obsidian is a material used in the game to communicate magic and power, from the Mystic weapons to the foundation of the Wizards Tower Ancient Wonder. By retexturing the rocks and cliffs to be obsidian, it really helped give the umbral layer its own flair. Here we see the Temperate Gold Node Map change into the Umbral Abyss, the textures, trees, rocks and lighting all swap out to place you in another world -

While some maps appear more natural others feel more dangerous with sharp insectoid shapes, the spawner and Dwelling maps for instance have additional sets -

Since we are a small team we have to think creatively to save time, this delights our producers! In this instance we had the idea to retexture roots using Substance Designer to be used as tentacles for map decoration -

As it’s a top down game the ground textures make up 90% of what you see at any given time. Spending extra effort here really helps the overall visual fidelity and mood. Here are some tests with torn tendril textures, we ended up toning it down as ultimately the readability of the units are the most important and they got lost in the noise created by this texture, but still makes for a very cool look and feel. We ended up making a whole host of tactical combat maps with these new creepy assets -

Your Forms

Fans of Age of Wonders past might recognise these 2 new forms; we brought back the fan favourite insectoid, and the Syron, albeit reimagined -

The Syron

The game already has a lot of monstrous and gritty forms, with Eldritch Realms we wanted to introduce a counter to that with a beautiful form - the Syron. A race from previous game entries resembling elves. Instead of going down that road (since we already have elves) we decided to pivot them in a different direction. Initially, we leaned into something more aquatic with a squid-like form that would compliment the Eldritch leaders with strange tropical fish-like patterns or glowing deep-sea features that resembled stars -

Ultimately they felt too alien so we continued the exploration, maybe the tentacles were more like hair?
Let's try making them a bit more humanoid? -

Further exploration in 3D, pushing more beautiful features like large eyes and designed lashes, we also start playing with varied expressions to avoid a bland look. The pointy elf ears of the original Age of Wonders Syron were brought back as well as a few aquatic details and astral body patterns from earlier sketch directions. Lastly we played with emissive hair for an ethereal feel -

Since we don’t have the resources for facial rigs and animation we decided as part of the art direction to push expressions in the base heads as much as possible. This gives greater variation in the heads you can pick from and avoids the aforementioned bland expression look. This is not only apparent in forms, but you can see this below with some of the other creatures we made for the game -

Shadow Demons? Kir’ko? Insectoid!

Insectoid creatures have been a long-running feature in Age of Wonders, from the Shadow Demons of AoW:Shadow Magic, that inspired the Planetfall Kir’ko, we come full circle, bringing them back in Eldritch Realms. With this new Insectoid form you can use transformations to turn them into the original Shadow Demons, or angels, or undead etc. -

Your new Story Realms

We made 17 new illustrations for the 2 new story realms, really focussing on character-driven composition with vibrant colour design. Below is a sneak peek of 2, what do you think is happening here?

Your new events

To flavour the new Cosmic Happening events we ended up creating a new fullscreen UI. We leaned into the Empire Tree smokey tendrils as if everything is interconnected through its shadowy branches. Everything here is animated and moving from the stars and dark tendrils to the runes making the whole scene comes to life -

The happenings might give new interesting enchantment visuals -

Constellation particle FX -

Or new wildlife and maps -

Or temporarily change the lighting of the World Map -

Your Wildlife

You guessed it, MORE TENTACLES!

Since the Umbral Abyss is quite a dark place filled with gloom, we decided to make sure the wildlife were lighter in value - pale and fleshy with glowing hotpink kicks of colour. This way they would be readable on top of the new biome. Below we have a selection of some of the new creatures at different stages of production, through to an in-game model -

Early animation test trying to capture the feeling of a swarm, with stack scale and placement variations -

Throughout development the concept artists brainstorm many different ideas, the brain creature on the right is a self portrait of a concept artist doing just that. I thought it would be fun to take a peek down the road not traveled… There are many reasons some ideas don’t pan out, from design changes to technical limitations or simply having a better idea for something. So here’s a selection of creepy crawlies that didn’t make the cut -

Your Icons & Interface

I’d like to take some time here to highlight iconography and interface. What I find astounding is that every icon here represents a new gameplay concept with localized descriptive tooltips, and coded gameplay. There might also be additional animation or particle FX with bespoke audio -

Tome artworks, 3 new Eldritch Realms tomes and 3 representing the new Mystic subcultures as part of the free patch -

We couldn’t have an Eldritch DLC without having a reskin of the UI frame to match, you guessed it…even more tentacles -

Bonus

New Eldritch-themed Pantheon content to unlock…

And thank you to our brilliant community, we do all of this for you! Thank you Damndirtycat for this hilarious fan art!

That’s all folks! We really hope you enjoy Eldritch Realms as much as we enjoyed crafting it! If you’re hungry for more art please check out The Art of Age of Wonders 4 Dev Diary and The Art Of Primal Fury Dev Diary.

Wishlist Eldritch Realms:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2401860/Age_of_Wonders_4_Eldritch_Realms/

Send prayers for the image server, I think it became sentient for the sole purpose of strangling us after we fed it so many pictures

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