Developer: Wanted 5 games
Publisher and IP owner: Jumbo
My roles: Art direction, concept art and 2D asset creation (UI)
Together with Wanted5 Games I’ve created Stratego Online for Jumbo.
I’ve artdirected this project, designed the UI and made most of the 2D art.
My main goal for this game is to make it feel like you’re playing the game in a wartent during the Napoleonic War. Based on Jumbo’s requirements, the Stratego branding and my own ambitions for the art, we’ve explored several thematic concepts until we came to the concept of a mapscroll. When you play a game, the scroll opens to reveal the warmap you play on against your enemy.
We’ve released the game and are currently working on new features.
The artprocess can be devided in UI material and ingame material. UI material is all purely 2D drawn assets. But for the background assets we’ve set up a 3D to 2D workflow. We’ve made a lot of HTML5 games and often the engines don’t allow for good quality lighting, which has lead to our 3D games not looking as good as I wanted them to look. To avoid being dependend on light and render quality in Cocos, I’ve decided to setup a process where the 3D artist setup the game assets in 3D without colors, but with lighting. This then gets rendered and send to 2D, where the asset gets textured, pollished and exported to be put in the game as a 2D asset. I’ve already experimented with this process in one of our other projects (Cook&Match: Sara’s Adventure), so it was nice to be able to put our learnings in this project.
Rank Portrait Illustrations I made for the game. Number 2 and 9 were supplied by the client and the rest I’ve made myself. I worked with Midjourney to generate different portraits that I used as a base to speed up the process. I often cut and paste different images together and painted clothes over the characters to get to the design of the character that I intended for the rank. When I was happy with the base, I painted over it to get to a similar art style as the two characters supplied by Jumbo. The designs are based on the original Stratego line art rank illustrations.
Sonja van Vuure 