The Art of Iron Tower Studio Interview
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GB: With the ITS-concept being "one of each" (programmer, artist, designer), how do you stay sharp and inspired without other artists to bounce ideas off of? Oscar: Yes, it's a little hard to work without other artists, or without a good amount of concept art. We used many real world references for our assets, but even then, there is so much one alone can do to create visually interesting locations. So what I did was to show the areas in our forums, so that the forumites could give us some opinions and suggestions. For example, once I made a thread with a tour around the first town in the game, the forumites posted suggestions and even screenshots. They really helped me to get some ideas, and also allowed them to be a part of the development process.
GB: Working independently rather than with a major publisher has some obvious effects on in-game art, working with engines and graphical assets that can not or should not compete with mainstream games. What is your perspective on the kind of graphical goals an indie RPG developer should set for himself?
Oscar: I believe that any indie developer should try to focus on a graphical level that will allow him to finish the kind of game he is making. Many times I've seen many mods and indie games trying to bite off more than they can chew, or bite it in a very wrong way. For example, if you are making a big game like AoD, with around 50 different levels, set in mountains, canyons, deserts, forests, with 3 big cities, the last thing you should do is spend a week creating an awesome house model, full of small details. Make the models good looking but easy and fast to do, and lay out and finish the basics of every area. Then when all areas are done, go over them in phases and start adding an increasing amount of details. Don't focus on a small part of the game and try to perfect it before you move on. You'll burn yourself, and won't have even 10% of the game finished.
This leads to the importance of having a view of the whole game, setting realistic goals for yourself, and working hard towards them.
GB: That said, graphic design and graphic capability are two different things, with mainstream games sometimes getting away with having little of the former due to having an abundance of the latter. Where does indie game art fit in there?
Oscar: I believe that indie games can have an edge on being able to create less generic settings due to not having a publisher's pressure to go with settings that appeal to the broader market. But, barring some exceptions, they rarely have the possibility to fully implement that vision, due to the lack of manpower or tools to do so. Indie games can compensate those limitations by having a huge amount of polish, good performance and lots of attention to details and coherence of the setting. Some indie games can have some great art direction, but many times it depends a lot on the type of game they are. You can usually find some nice art in platformers, some adventure and puzzle games, since they are quite short and linear in their exploration, but in big RPGs that include lots of locations, a big number of armor, weapon and clothing sets, a huge amount of combat animations, etc, it's harder to achieve a very high art quality.
GB: Age of Decadence appears to be in a comfortable spot of being finished but getting tons and tons of polish. Take us through some of the improvements the polish time has allowed you to make.
Oscar: We are going over all the parts of the game. Vince is improving the old quests, adding more options to them and tweaking the writing, Nick is improving some old code and replacing some placeholder stuff, and I'm working on improving the looks and performance of the game. Some of the things I'm doing are improving extremely old, blocky models, replacing some textures that didn't have the same quality as others, adding more detail to levels like better lighting, props, better ground texture and vegetation, etc. Also I'm working along with Nick on improving the performance of the game. I'm optimizing old models, reducing drawcalls and adding different LOD levels and imposters to reduce the polycount of the scenes. We are getting some really nice results in both looks and performance.
Also I'm working with Nick, Ivan and Vince of the final implementation of the quests, dialogues and text adventures, making use of different camera positions, animations, poses, fade in and outs, particle effects, etc. It's shaping up really well.
GB: Probably a difficult question to answer, but are you satisfied with the way Age of Decadence looks now (or with the way you realistically expect it to look when you're done polishing)?
Oscar: Yes, I'm quite happy with how it's looking. Being a perfectionist, I think it can look much better, but considering the limitations, it looks good enough. At least it won't scare potential customers away with ugly visuals, although we're well aware that the visuals won't please people who are accustomed to the latest and the greatest graphics. One thing I would like to change is the general style of the GUI, making a really detailed one like the ones used in Fallout, PST or Icewind Dale, that told a lot about the world. But we are kinda late in development for that, and those kinds of interfaces have lots of issues with scalability and different resolutions.
