Kingdoms Entre Course

Overview

The course Entre was about setting up a bogus company and to present a demo, movie and whatever else we could produce to generate Hype for the game.

The game was of course imaginary, so me and my partner Cristian went about creating visuals and surrounding material for a free online rpg for the iphone.

This was interesting because at this time no such game existed for the iphone platform.

Making money

How was our company Pixels, going to make money from this game? Well the client would cost a small sum, and then we would have a system where we would earn small sums from auctions and trade in the game between players. Similar systems exist in other mmorpgs.

It was a simple idea, and one that could work assuming it would be a stable and fast game.

My role in the projects and the goal

I was responsible for craeting artwork for the game. We needed to present the game somehow, and we chose to do this by a short movie. We really did not have any time for modelling and animation, and we had no "real" game to show.

So I drew a series of images of the classes and of some enemies. This I thought would work well as concept art to show potential customers, and to be included in the movie.

We concuded we needed dwarves, humans, undead, elves and wizards among others. I then created the following artwork.

Hero characters

Kingdoms Enemies

All images can be viewed at deviantART

Creating the Promo image

I wanted to have some object or element that spoke of fantasy. I found a rather nondescript picture of a foggy sky and after modifying it some it felt right.

I had just begun to look at ZBrush, and even though it still confused me, I started to sculpt to try to create a helmet.

From a basic Sphere I arrived at this image.

It is not perfect or even functional as a helmet, but I knew that was not important for the shot. The helmet would be partly hidden by flames and text anyway.

In Maya I then spent some time trying different camera-angles, lighting and positioning of the helmet.

For effect I added flames to the letters and ran the animation-loop searching for the best frame of flames.

When I had the shot I was looking for, I rendered out the images for compositing in Photoshop, finalizing the image for our school-presentation.

Generating Hype

To get the word out, Crisitan wrote about the game on a few select places on the web we also published the short move. Even though it wasn't much, just a few concept art and the promo-image, we did get some interest.

In fact I feel quite confident that we would have had an audience for the game had it been for real.

All in all it was a good course, both in terms of production, but also in business-awarenes.

The final Promo

Here is the final composit

You can view it in a larger version at deviantART here

View the finished Promovideo on youtube here

Programs and tecniques used on this project:

handpainting and drawing
Sculpting in Pixologic ZBrush
Texturing, Lighting and positioning in Maya
3D and fire-animation in Maya
Compositing in Adobe Photoshop

Thank you for reading.

Gabriel