Hello there, tacticians! I’m Rodrigo Correa, art director for Sword Legacy: Omen at FIrecast Studio. For this second developer blog post we’re going to talk about why we chose to work with cartoon aesthetics and how we adapted them to match the concept of our project.
Throughout this article, we’ll also share some excerpts from the Sword Legacy: Omen digital art book, available with the Digital Deluxe Edition on Steam.
It’s safe to say Sword Legacy: Omen drew a lot of inspiration from classic Disney animation from the 1960s-80s. The result would be something timeless but we knew deep inside that we would also bring our own unique touch to the art style.
In particular, we were most influenced by The Black Cauldron (Disney, 1985) and The Sword in the Stone (Disney, 1963). The Black Cauldron definitely inspired us and helped us create a darker and nostalgic mood for the project, while The Sword in the Stone was another important reference for us both in terms of visuals and its historical setting.
Nostalgia is a very important component in our visual style. We think these old animations and cartoons of our childhood have a huge impact nowadays. We just love to develop all these nostalgic characters, landscapes and scenes.
At the start of development, we had a very colourful and classic visual style. Traditional Disney character designs tend to have realistic proportions of the body, with facial expressions characterised by exaggeration, and peculiarly distorted poses. Their traits are dynamic and bring the drawing to life, but they lack the bloody violence and rolling heads that we wanted for Sword Legacy: Omen. We decided to make something more dark, bloody, smoked, decadent and with a unique art style.
The whole process was very intense and required immense intellectual, manual and technical work. It was satisfying work to develop all the main heroes and the wider cast of characters that appear in Sword Legacy: Omen. It took a great amount of team work to get from those early designs to the finished game.
Igor Pessoa, concept artist on Sword Legacy: Omen adds, “Creating the Sword Legacy characters was a fun and exciting task. Our goal was to give each hero personality and a unique and distinct look without losing too much of the recognisable characteristics of each class.”
You could say it was a great adventure, full of challenges and achievements! Much like Uther’s party of warriors and wizard, everyone who participated in the development team has a unique importance. We feel that the end result is a very beautiful game that lives up to our ambitions and feel a great deal of relief and a sense of mission accomplished!
Sword Legacy: Omen releases 13th August 2018 on Steam, in both standard and Digital Deluxe editions. Wishlist and follow today to stay informed about the release!
Read dev blog 1 “Strategy RPGs” here
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