Legend of Grimrock: Making of Monsters

There’s a new “making of” blog entry up on the official Legend of Grimrock website, and this time it’s Juho sharing an elaborate tutorial on the process the small team goes through when constructing the many monsters that inhabit Grimrock’s dungeons. Quite a few step-by-step sketches and other artwork accompanies it, so it’s highly recommended viewing:

Monsters are an essential part of Grimrock’s dungeons and I thought I’d share some in-depth look at some of them. Legend of Grimrock features twenty unique monsters whose shape and size range from green jelly to. well, all you who have finished the game know to what. Here I have picked three of my favorite monsters that I enjoyed making the most and still feel happy about.

The basic consensus that applies to all LoG’s monsters is that they should support the gameplay. Monsters are designed based on the needs of varying the gameplay or making the difficulty rise up. When we know what type of enemy we need, we start to brainstorm and looking for references of what the monster could be like. After that I start designing and modeling them. Due to our rather tight schedule, one monster usually took to design, model and texture around one week. Some more complex models took maybe couple of days longer. All the monsters are relatively low spec with 5000-10000 triangles with mostly 1024×1024 px maps on diffuse, specular and normal channels. Modo 501, Zbrush and Photoshop were the primary tools to create the monsters. All the monsters were rigged and animated by Olli in XSI, but maybe more about that later.