The Art of Iron Tower Studio Interview

Iron Tower Studio is an independent RPG developer, that simultaneously serves as a contact hub for indie titles to share resources and developers, including titles such as The Age of Decadence and Dead State. A small staff is behind the studio, with each individual handling highly specialized functions while simultaneously wearing many hats in day-to-day development. To get a better idea of how it all works, we talked to the studio’s art director, Oscar Velzi, about the two titles he is working on (The Age of Decadence and Dead State) and his general thoughts on art in independent titles.

GB: Tell us a bit about yourself. What led you into the world of indie RPGs?

Oscar: I’ve always wanted to make games, but I never knew about the indie scene. I’ve tried studying programming, but I suck at math and moved on. Years later, I graduated with a master degree in human resources and forgot about making games. One day I stumbled upon RPG Codex and Vince’s Oblivion review. I browsed the site and noticed the AoD forum. “What a cool game”, I thought, “I want to play it! What can I do to help?” And then I saw a thread complaining about the old interface. I decided to try my hand at it. I had done some texturing work for Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, or OOO, so I had some “experience” (basically, I knew about photoshop layers). I started working with ITS in the interface, while at the same time I was working as a modder for Rome: Total War and part of the Beta Test of Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword. I ended up doing some of the unit textures that shipped with Civ: BTS. After getting that experience, I offered to work on the game textures for Vince, and I became a permanent part of ITS. And well, the rest is history.

GB: There’s two different projects you are heavily involved with coming from Iron Tower Studios: Age of Decadence and Dead State. Give us a quick rundown on both from your perspective as art director.

Oscar: From a technical standpoint, they are quite similar. Both use the custom Torque engine we made for AoD. They are tile based 3D isometric RPGs, and the way to design levels for both games is very similar.

But from an artistic view, they are quite different. First, AoD is set in a Romanesque fantasy world, while Dead State is set in a (real) world with modern environments (plus the zombies). Apart from the setting, when I started working on AoD many of the models and general art style was already set. Combined with all the tasks I had to do plus learning the tools and techniques of the trade, I wasn’t able to create a distinctive art style from the beginning. Since in Dead State I’m focusing more on the art side, I will be able to create an art style from the beginning and apply all the experience I got from AoD.

GB: Despite the art direction being so different, were you able to reuse assets from Age of Decadence for Dead State, or did you have to go from scratch art asset wise?

Oscar: I couldn’t reuse many of the assets. Some items here and there, mostly models, since the texturing technique I’m using now is different to the one I used back then. In my early AoD work I rarely custom tailored the props’ textures. I usually just dropped a corresponding material (for example, a wood texture on a table), did some UVM mapping and called it a day. Now I’m adding more details to the textures, so if I use a model from AoD I re-do the texture. What we are going to do is re-use is some of AoD animations.

GB: What are your tasks as art director?

Oscar: Despite what the name implies, I’m practically the whole art department, except for animations and character models.

In AoD, I have quite a few tasks on my back: creating concepts for the locations, modeling, texturing and level design. This last item includes everything from the overall level design, placement of models in the scene, lighting, sounds, terrain to quest scripting and placing NPCs. Furthermore, I work on the GUI and all the icons in the game. I also help Vince with the design of the combat system and quests, and I’m the main tester of the game for Nick. I’m in charge of the item and character databases as well. Strictly speaking about art, I take care of the whole mood the world conveys, through visual and sound means.

In Dead State I’m focusing mostly on the purely art stuff, doing the whole pipeline for it, although Brian participates as a level designer as well. Also, we are getting help from some contributors doing some props and weapons, and a character artist who is working on the human and zombie models. In their case, I work closely with them and give them guidelines on the art style and technical specifications.

As you can see, as an indie dev I have to wear many hats. I would say that ultimately my task is to get the game done.

GB: Vince is the lead and public face of Age of Decadence and as you mentioned, this was an ongoing project when you joined. How much of the art direction was set at that point? Can you give us an idea of the core art direction concepts that you’re working with?

Oscar: By the time I joined, many of the models for the game were already done, setting much of the style. The textures were made by Nick, our programmer, and some occasional freelance artists. So my first task was to unify the look of the game, giving it a color scheme, a consistent texture quality, etc. But I also try to focus in (creative direction), tying the visuals to the level design, internal consistency of the setting and situations, sounds, music, trying to convey a certain mood through all these items. When working on them, I try to convey a feeling of desolation, faded glory, hopelessness, a ruined world. The world of AoD is a bleak one, and I try to convey that through all the means at my disposition.

GB: You’re also working on Dead State. Can you give us an idea of the core art direction concepts that you’re working with for that title?

Oscar: Sure. Unlike AoD, I’ve been with with Dead State since the beginning. This gives me both freedom and a big responsibility. While I’m still playing around with the art style a little, the goal is to give players a sense of familiarity with the environment, showing them everyday places in a new light. There would be areas that would be completely looted, in disarray, and others that will be just. empty of life, as if the humans just disappeared leaving their life behind. We want to tell little stories with the props and areas in the game, that will allow you to see what was happening there some time ago, or when the apocalypse hit. And as a counterweight, we have the shelter, which is an island of order in a sea of chaos. There things are quite different to the outside world. It’s a place with life, a reminder of how things were before. That’s what I’m aiming to capture. I’m still working on the actual art style for the game, but those are the goals I have.

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.