heights in their level, you’ll quickly realize that you never find a place located on top of another. Having a saloon with a second
increase our budget at all (creating tonnes of 2D animated assets isn’t cheap to produce either), and the strict 2D view was too restrictive for gameplay very quickly. Once this decision was made, the final game wasn’t so far away from what we had in mind four years ago. Sure, the art has been refined on several levels over the course of the production, but it was more adjustments and evolution of it than something different. So I would say that we are pretty close to what we were aiming for. As a little story, you can find in the actual games a lot of assets that were created for the first tests four years ago. The main saloon in Grackle was, in fact, the first building created and was our test map for the first months of the game’s production.
AS THE ART CAME TOGETHER, DID IT INFLUENCE THE DESIGN OF THE GAME IN ANY WAY? IF SO, HOW? Yes. But it wasn’t just the art by itself. One of the key things at WolfEye is that all the members of the art team (well, ok, it’s limited in terms of people…) are not only artists, but also veterans of the game industry that are strong gamers. So we are always thinking gameplay first when creating any piece of art. Even if something looks amazing, if it doesn’t really work for gameplay, we immediately drop the idea without having to lose too much time (or money). Most of the game design ideas of Weird West were here
from the beginning, thanks to the experience and talent of the team.
What was probably the biggest impact made by the art was the fact to switch from a simple 2D game located on a single plane for a full 3D environment, especially as we wanted to have multi-floor buildings that can be fully visitable… and the possibilities to access to roofs too. This is something that seems small, but is in fact very
rare for dual stick shooters, as it is suddenly another third dimension to the aiming system. If you think of a game like Diablo 3, that seems to have a lot of volume and several
May 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 55
floor and an open balcony immediately presents some challenge: How do you allow the player to easily target what’s he want, when both targets can be right in front of him, but on different floors, and while keeping the freedom to aim wherever you want without any auto-lock or switch between targets? This particular problem took us months to solve, but in the end, we are really satisfied with what we have now.
WHAT HAS THE RESPONSE BEEN LIKE FROM PLAYERS - TO THE GAME’S VISUALS ESPECIALLY? Looks like it has been very positive so far, so we are really happy and proud of it. We think that the main complaint that we’ve heard so far is that it is a bit repetitive over time, and that people would have liked to see more variety. And we totally agree with them… we also would have liked to add more and more, but well… having already this whole world created like this with our very limited team is already a proud achievement for us. Now, let’s get back to the table to produce more assets. As long as the game is a success, that will allow us to improve our world and add more variety, locations and new places to discover.
Believe us, we still have a lot of ideas that we would love to see added to the game!
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64
