The Art Style of Fableborne
As Fableborne evolved, the art style changed with it. Bringing characters and the environment truly alive, while creating an inclusive visual environment is by far not an easy feat. We want our players to resonate with the visuals, feel immersed and welcomed to the Shatterlands.
VISUAL EVOLUTION
Throughout the development of the prototype game that became Fableborne, we used a different art style, but decided to change the direction mid-development.
Reasons for Change
The original vision for the game was much more simplified and casual. The characters had a very stylized chibi appearance and overall the style had a lot less detail. The colour palette differed a lot as well, we were using very bright and colorful gradients.
As the project evolved, we realized that the previous art style was no longer the best option for our game or target audience. We wanted to display the deep lore of Fableborne and use this to build out all of our characters with a rich backstory.
Fableborne’s new style lends itself well to incorporate more details, allowing us more freedom in design. We also knew that we want our players to connect to the characters themselves, so we spend a lot of time and effort figuring out how we can bring the characters to life within all areas of the game.
Adaptation of Existing Designs
Adapting our initial Hero designs from very different proportions and style while keeping their personality and iconic look intact was probably the biggest challenge we had to overcome.
How characters will look is one of the most important and hardest decisions to make when creating a character-focused game. The process is rarely straightforward and requires a lot of iteration if you really want to get it right. We started with a very casual style for the heroes, it was functional and worked for our initial ideas for the game but as the vision grew we knew we would need to reimagine everything from the ground up, to leave a great impression with our players.
In the end, the style we decided to go with is one that allows for a lot more creative freedom, which is still relatively fast to produce and will allow us to focus on truly bringing the personalities of the characters to life.
Readability Not to be Forgotten
Keeping readability clear despite the increased detail levels compared with the old visual style was another big challenge. For this we focused on visual hierarchy, thinking about which details should stand out the most and pull the players attention. For Heroes, this is mostly the hands and the head, so we make sure to have sufficient detail in these areas and then scale back some details on other areas, especially the lower half of the body. This works especially well when viewed on a small screen from the isometric perspective.
ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN
When building Fableborne, we are striving to create environments that are as beautiful as they are exciting.
Narrative by Design
Islands and their elements become part of the narrative, we want the environment in our game to convey the story and invite exploration of the world without getting in the way of the gameplay.
In Fableborne, you are an explorer of the Shatterlands, an inhabitant of the floating islands that were once part of the Old Ream, which is why it’s important to convey the feeling of being high up in the sky. We want players to feel immersed in the expansive, floating world that we are creating. Anything that can push this feeling; such as colour palette, dramatic use of clouds and creating depth through parallax is invaluable to us.
Island Biomes & Elements
The Shatterlands consists of different elemental biomes that govern not only the style of islands but also the dangers you will face when exploring them. Each biome is visually very different which creates variety and allows players to experience a range of story moments and moods.
Biomes are categorized in different types, each one having a primary element and then a number of secondary elements associated with them. For example, on a fire-based island, we may add the two secondary elements of lightning and earth. In this case, lava would be spilling out of fissures in the ground of the island, while lightning storms are clashing overhead.
This impacts the look of islands and makes it very obvious at first glance to which biome any environment belongs to, but also creates a wide variety of visuals and keeps the environment fresh and exciting to explore.
Individual islands will vary based on randomization and rarity. The rarest islands will fittingly have the most impressive features, although even the most common islands will still look beautiful and have plenty of exciting things for players to discover.
DESIGN OF TOWERS
Like islands, towers and their abilities are also associated with an element, which is displayed in their design. Since towers can be upgraded multiple times, it is important not only to just increase their power in raw numbers, but the tower’s visuals need to level-up as well. A fully upgraded tower needs to look powerful and impressive compared to its low-level counterpart.
Accessibility in Fableborne also means designing towers with a clear read in mind, including differentiating between archetypes like Mortar Tower and Arrow Tower, and telegraphing attacks. Even at first glance, just looking at the silhouette alone, the design in Fableborne is clearly communicated to players.
CREATING CHARACTERS
Heroes in Fableborne, and their Echoes, the playable characters, are the center-piece of attention in the game. Our Heroes need to look cool, engaging and fun — we want our players to unlock, upgrade and play them! Every Hero has a unique design that helps them to stand out and adds to their story and character.
The design of Heroes is determined by the body type and silhouette, creating clear character archetypes — light, medium and heavy — making mages feel slender and graceful, archers athletic and fast, and big brawlers powerful and tanky.
It needs to be obvious in which category a Hero falls into, as clarity of visuals is one of our core design principles. The shape and proportions of a Hero also defines their character, a wide triangular body with top heavy proportions helps to make a Hero feel heroic and powerful. For example, our first heavy character looks like they could take a few punches with a broad grin on their face, enjoying the midst of battle!
This helps us keep a diverse, interesting roster of Heroes which caters to different playstyles, but also makes their gameplay and element instantly identifiable.
When designing Heroes, different body styles, facial features and skin colors help us to create an inclusive environment. This is important, because our players are from all walks of life and this should be represented in our characters too. We want everyone to find a character they resonate and identify with. After all, the Shatterlands are a place everyone belongs to.
One aspect we really wanted to step away from with our game was the oversexualiztion of characters. We want our Heroes to be appealing to all players and not just because they aren’t wearing much! We want players to love the personalities of the characters we are building and find the Hero that speaks to them personally.
BRINGING CONCEPTS TO LIFE
After our Game Design Team and the Developers created a prototype of a new Hero character, creature or building, the Fableborne Art Team will start the process of conceptualizing in both 2D and 3D. It’s really important to always think about how the new element will look once it has been added to the game and being viewed by the player through the game camera.
First our talented 2D Artists will create some rough sketches with different ideas. After the concept is approved, the next step is to block out the rough shape and bring it into the game engine to have a look at it from the game camera.
Once we are happy with the overall shape, we will continue iterating and exploring different options for how we want it to look. We are always sharing our work within the team to make sure we are creating the strongest design possible!
In the later stages of the process, the final concept is passed onto our 3D Artists to create the actual game models with various polygon counts.
We decided early on to create the same model with different polygon counts, to have true optimization and scalability. The higher the game resolution, the closer the camera is zoomed in, the higher the polygon count of our models will be, and in return, if no close up is required, we use the lower polygon count model, which greatly improves the game performance.
Last but not least, we make sure that the new Hero or Building fits within the rest of the environment of the world and once all of it is confirmed, we are ready to add the visual effects!
Make sure to subscribe to the newsletter, join our community on our Discord server, and follow us on Telegram and Twitter to stay up to date with Fableborne!
Let’s embark on an exciting journey together, let’s #becomefableborne.
THE FABLEBORNE TEAM
