In this last fortnight the Design Guys have written a little about the level design of the Tsar Project. As Beto said, today I’ll show something of the translation of the architecture researches we’ve done and the level design created in the background concept arts. And even more, I’ll talk about a really great software we’re using, the japanese Easy Paint Tool SAI.

So, it all started with 17th century maps like this one above (a crop of a dutch map published in 1662 that covers the area between Beklemishevskaya and Nikolskaya Towers of the Moscow Kremlin). Those maps show us the Kremlin just after the start of the Romanov Era, when it past for several changes. The exact period in which we focused our researches for the Tsar Project is considerably blurred by time, we’ve had a hard time in finding what we needed to start the reconstruction of the palaces proper. It was then, and continues to be, a great luck and reason of happiness to us, to count with the collaboration of Julia Tarabarina, a historian of russian architecture and editor of the Russian Architectural News Agency.

With the proper orientation we’re able to continue the development of the level design, according to the architecture of the 16th century buildings, and start creating those schematic maps Beto told you about. The next step was then to translate plans, references and level design into concept arts. The point here was to create imagery that would both communicate the mood of the game and be a preview of the different types of tiles, textures and lightning effects that we would use later on the project.

And then SAI came up. A good friend of Aduge, a fish from the design college called Okazaki, presented me this tiny software (it’s installer being smaller than 3Mb) that is tremendously useful. As the name emphatically tells, Easy Paint Tool SAI is a user-friendly digital painting software. What the name doesn’t say is that, despite the minute size of the software and of it’s Tokyo based development team, Systemax’s SAI is, imo, far more precise and powerful than Adobe’s Photoshop and stratospherically more intuitive and fluid to use and configure than Corel’s Painter.

To be continued…

Giving sequence to the series of posts about the Tsar Project, today the subject is Level Design which is the development of the game’s setting and background from the most wide scope (location) to the most specific details (desk positioning).

The Level Design of Tsar Project was conceived after a thorough research of the Moscow Kremlin architecture circa XVI century, done mainly by our Art Director, Maperns. The continuous drive for accurate textual and pictorial information to compose our historical fiction made us reach a russian architect and historian, Julia Tarabarina. With  her kind support we managed to gather information about the building layout and structure, and architectural blueprints of that century and posterior ones.

Building from this knowledge we started the development of the Level Design properly, designing the necessary modifications to make game interesting but always trying to preserve the historical accuracy. The first step was to gather all information that we had collected by drawing blueprints of all floors of all of the Kremlin main palaces, in order to create a better understanding of the game space. These blueprints then were simplified to help the work of the game designers and programmers.

After this, we started to work on the game events, placing them on the game space. We also designed a huge mind map with all rooms and their connections, NPC placement, item placement and guard routes and routines. Both were also tested on our software prototype and Lego mock-ups. These maps also helped the development of the first background concepts which Maperns is doing directly on Paint Tool SAI, a very powerful (and cheap) japanese painting software which he will present on his next post.

I’ve been silent for a while now, but now I’m here. My name is Thiago, but you can call me Beto, and I am Aduge’s game designer. I will try to be more present on this distinct blog from now on.