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by Mark Tucker, Lead Designer for Dungeon Runners

The creatures in Balzack's Burrow are a mix of technology and organize beings.

Being one of those legacy projects that's inherited more than its share of resources (code, system architecture, networking, music and artwork) over the years, Dungeon Runners has had a lot of art to draw from for its vast selection of nasty, oddball and frankly freakishly hideous monsters. Of course, after awhile we’ve nearly run out of all the stuff we can easily use or steal. More and more we’ve internally developed new creatures, sticking with the concepts and themes we’re familiar with. As our team grows, you’ll be seeing many more strange and horrific creatures to deal with, as well as some surprising ones we’re still keeping under our hat.

All sorts of information gets passed along to the concept artist.

Let’s focus on the actual process of creating some of Dungeon Runners’ monsters however. Recently for the development of Balzack’s Burrow the design team required some new mutant-type creatures that had a mix of technology about them. We may have certain requirements for any particular creature, like relative size, variety of attack types (meaning we’d be able to re-use the creature with slight variations depending on what they do), and so forth. We take all of this helpful information and hand it off to the concept artist.

When the concept art is finished, then the fully fleshed out monster gets created.

Dawid Strauss, our externally contracted concept artist, develops a series of quick sketches, and we pick out the ones we like, or bits and pieces that we like, discard the rest, and go through another round until we get what we like. This can take quite a few iterations before we’re satisfied. When that happens, we ask the concept artist to do a polished pencil image, which has a lot more detail, which we also comment on and there’s some back-and-forth going on. From there we’ll go to “orthos”, where we draw the side, back and front (and sometimes the top-down) detailed to-scale profiles. A lot of the three-dimensional modeling is based on what we get with the orthos.

Obviously, the creatures don’t just show up in the game as detailed black and white wireframe models (though that could be really cool). Before they go into the game, typically we’ll go through a series of color studies, which are similar to the pencil sketches in that we’re applying colors to the polished images to see how they look and what works best. However, since we already had a color scheme set up for mutants we skipped this step. Finally, the concept artist will apply a full detailed paint-over of the pencil sketch, which will serve as a reference when we’re texturing the model.

Once the model has been created, then it gets put into the game to see how it looks.

After the creature is thrown into the game, then its up to the players to slaughter them!

At this point it’s time to get cracking on the modeling. The modeler creatures a three-dimensional model of the creature with 3DS Max, which is then textured, rigged, and fully animated. This can also be a long process, depending on the complexity of the model and what we require for full animation. We’ll stick the model into the game and see how it looks. Maybe the colors are off a bit when you compare it to its fellow mutants, the scale doesn’t look quite right, or the animations are too rough.

As with the other major processes of creature creation, there are quite a few polish passes to get everything just right before we move on to the next stage, which, in this case, is to let the designers stick them in a dungeon and let them get slaughtered. That’s where our Mutant Spitter and Wasp come into play, as you can see in the screenshots here.

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