Workflow of making MAP art for a CCG

   Our team at Novtilus had made map art for the CCG  (Collectible Card Game) Warnuts, which is developed by Happylatte. It has 12 zones of map for its release version. The game is available in New Zealand now. Here I want to share the workflow with my faithful readers, and thank you for your support all along!

Brief info of the game:

   The game play is a bit like the traditional RPG, your team fight the foes in a screen looking down from the top, except you damage the foes by crashing head long into them, some physical collision involved.

   The game is level based, that in each level you can beat a boss and summon him/her to your team later. So a level progress map is needed.

  You can collect hundreds of characters in this game , although there’s no card in the game, you can think it as a CCG. We’re now making character art for this game also.

Determine the art style and detail level: 

   This is a brand new game, so first we need to work out the art style and detail level.

   After much debate, out client decides to use the popular vertical scrolling format map, which fits mobile phone screens very well, and easy to add updates.

  We gather some maps of some hot games to show the client, and discuss with them about the art direction. And at last, our client says,

 “Well, we want the sharpness of that of Bubble Witch Saga 2, but it should look painted, not very 3D. ”

“The happy mood of Farm Hero Saga, and bright, vivid colors.”

“But the map shouldn’t be very busy.”

“The scale of elements should be like this picture.”

“The camera angle should be like this picture.”

“And go ahead to make the first two zones as a trial!”

Then we take over the full description of the first two zones, one is a port city and another a magical forest.

This is the trail map we made, after some minor fixes.

Our client says it’s very nice, we can go with all other zones in this style.

Overall planning:

   For the release version, we need 12 zones. The client’s game design team make full descriptions of all the zones. The first thing we do is to draw a long sheet of draft, which is the 12 zones connecting head to head.

This blue print is very important, it indicates that how adjacent zones should connect- for this type of maps, we need natural transition between zones, no one wants obtrusive connections.

   And on this blue print, we can evaluate the balance between zones. And we can put on level nodes to see the spacing. In this game, there would always be 6 levels in a zone.

Cut the map to be created by multiple artists

  After the blueprint is decided, we can proceed to make the art works. The final art is for retina screen, high quality and sharp images. That the art work of each zone would take 4~5 days to complete. If we assign all the 12 zones of map to one single artist, it would take 2~3 months. Our client wants the map in one month, so we have to cut the blueprint and assign the job to many artists.

  You can see, each artist would paint 2~3 zones of map in one piece.

The procedure of each artist:

   Each artist would work on the assigned piece, in quite conventional procedure:

Step 1: Line art

Step 2: Color design

Step 3: Finish painting

You can see the maps of this game are rich in contents and stories:

Piece them up:

  When all the zones are approved, we need to piece them up, to make the one single long strip of map you see in games. 

  The first thing is to fix transition between zones. You can see that zone 5 & 6 are made by an artist in one piece, it would be nice transition; And Zone 4 & 5 are made by different artists in two pieces, the transition would be problematic.

  So we put adjacent pieces of work made by different artists, and then fix the transitions.

  Other things need post editing are the balance of color, saturation and contrast. For we want all the zones are uniform in these qualities. 

Animations:

   For this is the first release of the game, our client thinks it’s prudent not to include any animation on the map, only static images.

  However, even a few moving things would add a lot life to the map. For example, the shaking of the trees, fountains, flames, etc. If you want to add such animations to your map, you need to plan them from the very beginning. You should first know what techniques are available to you to make those effects. Then you plan the animations at the game design stage.  It would be great that the animations can be defined as objects that you can place them by the game editor.

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I would post regularly--one article every two weeks, about game art production.