Tertiary-Art Development Blog

'Sup everybody! :)

This week we have an in-depth development blog for you!

The doodads in the header are a small selection of the grasslands biome painted by Shukuchy, our secondary artist. They were mentioned a few times in previous dev blogs here on Patreon, and now we'll finally outline how and why they were created for the game...

But first, a bit of a tangent: we know most of you follow and support ToLLA for its lewd content, yet the actual game in ero-game is also important. Because without things like story, characters, and background art there can't be any adult scenes (well technically there could, but it wouldn't be a lot of fun, and the game would play more like a kinetic novel than a true party-based RPG with free roam). Today's entry is about one such tertiary aspect of ToLLA's development - it should interest anyone who's intrigued by how asset pipelines work in video game production. As fancy as all that sounds, it's just an industry way of saying "game-elements assembly line".

ToLLA, like any other video game, is made up of a large amount of small interlinked blocks, almost like a LEGO project. One of these chunks is the background doodad art, which, while not as sexy as nudes, still carries its weight in how important it is for the overall visual presentation of the game. Area maps would look empty without doodads, which is why we invested a chunk of the artists' time into developing these for present and future use. Viximara (our art lead) was set on capturing the old-school feel of isometric RPGs, as those games look good even today due to their beautiful area art... Pic below is an exterior map in Icewind Dale II, a game from 2002!

Another amazing game from 2002 with gorgeous doodad art was Warcraft III, by Blizzard Entertainment. For the older among you, if you've ever played custom Warcraft III maps (or messed around in its editor) then you'll remember how modular and powerful Blizzard made their map-creation software. Despite being an RTS, even the main campaign featured a set of hand-decorated maps which all had a unique layout and feel to them. Although a bit blocky-looking by today's standards, it was cutting-edge stuff when it came out, and still looks absolutely amazing for its age (owing mostly to the hand-drawn texture work).

So how does this tie into ToLLA? Well, when we were discussing how to approach our own map-creation efforts, the team took inspiration from these (and other) old-school 3D RPGs/RTSs. We considered treating each area as its own self-contained painting -- and having an artist paint it from start to finish as a huge backdrop -- but the workload needed to re-paint doodads for every exterior zone would require a team much larger than our humble indie operation. The decision to 'port' 3D functionality into a 2D game was an easy one for us, and came out of sheer necessity...

The main appeal of 3D for devs is its ability to easily manipulate and modify art assets. So instead of reinventing the wheel, we did something similar, but only in 2D - namely, the art team designed and planned out the asset production for the grasslands biome, which houses the beginning areas of the game (including the prologue Fort). Once that was done, Shuky worked her way through the list and finished every doodad piece by piece... The larger ones were hand-painted in 2000x2000, and the smaller ones in 1000x1000. Breaking down huge exteriors into many smaller parts allows us to make use of recombination in how we design and build our maps, and grants us a degree of modularity that would be impossible to pull off with just static images.

The best part about this approach is that once completed, these assets are added to our custom library, and can be used to decorate future areas (like exterior wilderness zones). This art asset library will grow as we continue to develop the game, and the more we add to it, the faster we'll be able to develop later areas because we'll have more finished art to choose from! Decorating new maps becomes as easy as dragging-and-dropping the finished doodads from our library into the new zone! "But won't that make things look too similar between different maps?" you ask.

In short, no. As you can see from the pic above, a single ToLLA doodad can be tweaked in many ways, and the result then cloned from the original. This lets us manipulate multiple variables (size, facing, geometry & deformation, color variance, saturation, etc.) to get a huge array of different outcomes, all with just a few clicks of the mouse! So not only does our asset library grow with time as the artists add more finished material to it, every individual asset also gives us a chance to use it in a multitude of different variations! Finally, each biome will gets its own set of doodads that's visually and thematically tied to it (Grasslands, Tundra, Dark Elf City, Swamp, Necropolis, etc.).

Probably the main reason behind the lengthy development time of Build#2 is the fact that our artists had to work on the regular lewds/sex scenes (which are time-consuming on their own), in addition to the entire exterior Fort map with all its buildings and multitude of doodads. There was no way to skip this workload -- apart from sacrificing visual quality -- but the finished result of all that labor is an asset library which will dramatically speed up the production time of future areas!

We know all of you like the lewds, but we hope you also enjoy reading these behind-the-scenes gamedev entries which detail our development process. ToLLA is an RPG first and erotic game second, so we think the actual game development stuff warrants at least a bit of time under the spotlight. We hope you agree, and that you had fun reading! :)

And with that we'll wrap up today's development blog.

With the doodads polished, Shuky has begun work on character portraits while Vixi grinds her way through the remaining lewds... We'll keep you all up to date as things develop, so don't forget to check in from time to time. Finally, thank you all for sending us messages and e-mails, we love hearing from you and reading your words of encouragement during our team meetings! ;)

As always, tune in next time for more cool stuff and news!

~ Crimson Delight Games

P.S. Here's the tree variation image in full, since Patreon loves downsizing pics.