Underworld Ascendant Reimagined Lizardmen Revealed

I will readily admit that Ultima Underworld doesn’t have much nostalgic appeal to me, as I was simply too young to play the game back when it was released. Because of that, this new developer update covering the process the developer used to arrive at a new look for the Lizardman race is unlikely to move me in the same way it might for a longtime fan of the series,  but I still feel that the developers’ artistic search and considerations make for very interesting reading material for anyone interested in this crowdfunded project.

A sampling:

We’ve all seen this in games , the reds and the blues, the big and the little. In a 3d FPS game the silhouette is very important. Like spotters on ships in WWII being able to identify a silhouette at a distance can be the difference between life or death.

Probably the best example of this in video games is Team Fortress 2. Its developers worked extremely hard to let the player be able to identify a class almost instantly.

We need to address the same problem and being a world of light and shadow, color is not always going to be an option as the identifier for us.

To address this with the Red Lizardmen, we decided to adjust his shape slightly in bulk and to give them some easy-to-read attachments that Green Lizardmen don’t have.