Artist Log [0] – Environment Design

Environment Design

Back to the beginning of this year, when we were talking about the setting of [Antima], we have decided that it would be based on Spain and southern Italy in terms of the natural environment and the architecture style. The weather is hot and dry, with strong sunlight during most time of the year.

When designing the map of [Ionforr], where [Edge] and [Abgail] started their journey, I had to find the architecture history textbook I haven’t look at for years, and searched about the rules of ancient Roman town planning, what Ancient Rome have brought to Spain when they have conquered there.

“The basic plan consisted of a central forum with city services, surrounded by a compact, rectilinear grid of streets. A river sometimes flowed near or through the city, providing water, transport, and sewage disposal”

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To zoom into more details, I have designed some tile-sets that are more and less standardized in most RPG games, such as stone pavements, brick walls, and grass. Last week FB showed me how they actually look like in Unity scene, and how they were used in his work-in-progress tile editor, which was really exciting! There are definitely differences between how they look like in Illustrator and how they look like in Unity scenes, and the additional lighting effects in Unity are something that should be taken into consideration when designing those tiles. The major thing I am concerned about is that I want the game to have some kind of hand drawing style, which is achievable for the character designs since they are done in Procreate. However, the modular nature of tile-sets could bring difficulties.

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Besides, I have also started drawing objects in environments such as trees, ruins, gates, and windows. What left me a really strong impression of Spain is the orange trees in the courtyards of the mosques, so we are definitely going to have a lot of them in our game lol.

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