Welcome to Developer Diaries! This is an ongoing series where a member of the Twirlbound team shares insight on how we build our games and reveals some of what goes on behind the scenes in our projects.
Hi, I’m Timo, and I am the Art Director at Twirlbound!
I joined Twirlbound back in 2014 when the team was just me, Matthijs (taking care of design), and Marc (handling all the programming). Over the years, I’ve had the chance to work on a variety of titles: With the Wind (my first game release at Twirlbound, made for iOS), RIGS: Mechanized Combat League (during my time at Guerrilla Cambridge), Pine, and most recently, The Knightling.
When I’m not building worlds, I’m usually into sports like bouldering, kayaking, obstacle runs, or tinkering with gadgets, cars or my motorcycle. However, almost all of those hobbies have had to take a backseat over the past year, as most of my free time now goes into renovating my new house!
While my title is Art Director, my main focus and passion lie with environment art, which I am still actively doing and spending most of my time in for all of our games. This is largely thanks to our incredibly talented art team. I know I can trust them to own their individual disciplines, which makes directing a lot easier and frees me up to do what I love most: figuring out how to build colorful, expansive open worlds with our relatively small team.
In today’s post, I want to take you on a little behind-the-scenes on how we landed on the art direction of The Knightling.
After shipping our previous game, Pine, we knew we wanted to change some things up for our next adventure. Pine was definitely a stylized game, but its biomes, shape language, and color palettes were still fairly grounded in reality.
For The Knightling, we wanted to push that stylization much further. We intentionally exaggerated the shape language and cranked up the colors to make the biomes feel a lot more fantastical. However, it was important to us that the world still felt believable, so we made sure to keep things grounded from a world-building perspective.
We drew a lot of inspiration from the beautiful, stylized worlds of games like RiME, Immortals Fenyx Rising and Genshin Impact, as well as the amazing work seen in Studio Ghibli animations.
With us being a small team making an open world, we also have to think about the practical side of things. Whatever visual style we chose had to be feasible within a certain timeframe and it had to run smoothly across a range of consoles.
During pre-production, we had to figure out how to balance the look of the world with the characters who inhabit it. We deliberately chose a cel-shaded base for our characters and interactable items to ensure they would clearly pop against the background.
However, we didn’t want the environments to look like they belonged in a completely different game. Our solution was to use a PBR-shader for the environment, but with clamped shadows to imitate cel-shaded lighting.
Alongside enhancing the stylization with shaders, we also prioritized the effective use of strong shape language and color theory. Because The Knightling’s progression is more linear than that of Pine, we aimed for the art to convey a clear visual progression throughout the game.
Apart from pushing the stylization using shaders, we also pushed the effective use of strong shape language and color theory. Because The Knightling’s progression is more linear than that of Pine, we wanted to make the most of that by creating a clear visual progression throughout the game.
A good example for this is The Outskirts, the first area the player starts in, a very vibrant and colorful biome. We used recognizable, warm colors to make it feel safe and happy, basically like a place where I would actually love to live. Because this is where the Humans reside, we designed the architecture and natural assets using very soft, round shapes to give everything a playful and friendly vibe.
As you gradually get closer to the final area, the mood and colors shift. We limit the color palette and alter the shape language to gradually get more mysterious and risky, until you arrive in Koinyx, the most dangerous area and home of the corrupted Earthborn. The player is greeted by a dark, purple atmosphere, looming buildings and pointy rocks that immediately put you on edge. The otherwise squarish Earthborn buildings you know from previous areas begin utilizing diagonal shapes and cold metal materials to feel hostile and industrial. Even the vegetation is burnt down; the soft, round silhouettes of trees and bushes are replaced with broken trunks and bare shrubs featuring thin, sharp shapes. The entire area is designed to give you the distinct feeling that you are not wanted there.
There is so much more I could talk about when it comes to the art direction and environment building of The Knightling, and I’d love to go more in-depth in a future feature-focused dev diary. However, for now, I want to leave room for the rest of our incredible art team to step up next! Keep your eyes open for coming dev diaries where they can share their own unique challenges, solutions, and behind-the-scenes stories. We’ve also started sharing some of our art on ArtStation, click on each artist below to see their work:
Also keep an eye on our socials for our next art drop! This is a great way to see what our artists worked on!