6 minute read
The Art Of
Lost Ember
Mooneye Studios brought us Lost Ember, a critically acclaimed indie title that lets players take control of a menagerie of animals across a stunning range of natural environments and beyond. We talk to art director Maximilian Jasionowski and CEO Tobias Graff.
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Maximilian Jasionowski, Art Director Tobias Graff, CEO
WAS THE APPEARANCE OF THE GAME CORE TO ITS INITIAL CONCEPT?
We always knew that the appearance of the game would be an important factor for creating the atmosphere we aimed for. An emotional story and captivating atmosphere was always at the very core of our design process. As such, the final art style itself wasn’t necessarily part of the initial concept, but we knew we had to put a lot of time and effort into finding that style. The art style changed a lot during the first year of the development and we had to toss and restart a lot of different ideas, but in the end we always knew that it would be worth it to spend this time at the beginning rather than realizing something’s not working at the end.
WHAT INFLUENCES DID YOU DRAW FROM?
The main influences for the art were drawn from Pixar movies like Up, but also some traditional art of Incan and Mayan cultures that were the basis for the old world players explore in Lost Ember.
TELL US HOW THE ART WAS CREATED AND BY WHOM?
The concept art was created by one of our co-founders, Maximilian Jasionowski, and then built in 3D by another of our co-founders, Matthias Oberprieler. The rest of the founder-team consisted of myself as programmer, technical artist and author and Pascal Müller, also a programmer. After creating the core ideas and concepts at the start of the development, our producer Sinikka Compart joined the team. Apart from these five core team members, we also worked with a
handful of freelancers and partners, especially for sound and animation.
CAN YOU PUT ANY NUMBERS ON THE SCALE OF THE PROJECT?
We have about 1,750 textures, 1,700 static meshes (960 of which are character pose meshes for our memory visions), 130 skeletal meshes, 11 matte paintings and about 98k lines of code.
WHAT TOOLS/TECHNIQUES WERE USED TO CREATE THE GAME’S LOOK?
The main tools we used to create the art were Photoshop, Maya, ZBrush, Substance Designer and 3D Coat.
HOW DID THE ART EVOLVE WITH THE PROJECT (IT AT ALL)?
The art very much evolved with the project. Early on we decided to experiment with different styles and test how quickly and well we could implement things into the game. At some point we landed on our guiding principle which was ‘stylized forms with realistic shading’. The Unreal Engine made it easy enough to create realistic materials and shading but we still wanted Lost Ember to have its own look and feel, which we tried to do with a simple form language that is aligned to story beats.
As the story evolved, we tried to express certain moods with subtle changes in the environment as well. For example, once the general storyline was written, we created a simplified timeline describing the different moods and let every member of the team match these different moods to colors. A similar approach led to a change of the general shapes of mountains and level outlines that match sharper edges with more aggressive situations in the story and round and soft shapes at times of peace and relaxation. These correlations of shapes and colors and the story is something that only developed slowly once more and more pieces of the final puzzle were put together. Above: “This shot was not only used as one of our main marketing images, but also served as an early concept shot that showed a colorful and diverse part of our world. This shot existed in many iterations since very early in the development process.”
Left: For the architecture we looked mainly at Incan and Mayan city buildings and tried to incorporate parts of the mountains into our cities. The Yanrana people shaped nature to their needs and tried to build powerful and dominant structures.
Below: For the human characters we landed on a simple design with clear silhouettes and minimal facial features. These characters would only be visible in the memory scenes with a glowing red material. Above: One of the most imposing characters of the game is certainly the buffalo. Not only is it in itself massive and strong, but it‘s also part of one of the most technically challenging scenes of the game: the buffalo stampede in which hundreds of buffalo gallop through a canyon, fleeing from a huge sandstorm. To make that technically possible we had to do various abstractions and simplifications to the model to be used in the distance without the repetition in color and animation becoming too obvious.
Right: One of the earliest concepts of the game. Fire always played a big part in our concept as a kind of healing agent of nature. Especially the idea of flying through massive structures being obliterated by fire felt like a powerful image.
Right: A stylized illustration of the whole world of Lost Ember – from green meadows and forests to snowy and cold mountain tops.
Below: The story of Lost Ember is mainly told in memory scenes like this. Important scenes of the past are being visualized as glowing red figures of smoke and ash.
Right: This scene shows the final version of one of the earliest concepts. A canyon filled with waterfalls, overgrown by plants and huge swarms of parrots.
Left: At certain points of the story we interrupt the normal gameplay with prerendered visions of the past. This image shows a simple storyboard for one of those visions.
Right: One detail I think most people will miss when playing Lost Ember is the effort we put into developing our own symbolic language. The Yanrana people used to wear amulets of their names as a way of showing individual pride. For this we developed a system to write any name and create an individual Yanrana symbol. We even created a generator to turn your name into one of these symbols at lostember.com/namegenerator.
