Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/4522
November 2009 10 ■ ■ ■ ■ Gaming of the game was bringing down our ability to make the game especially fun," Martel adds. "We wanted to meet the gameplay with the art style, and for us, that meant focusing fi rst on the gameplay, to let every- thing 'zing.' at, in turn, let the story go to new places and let the characters become more extreme. It became a huge snowball eff ect. Once we had that work done and the feel established, it enabled everyone—from designers, to writer, to artists—to create something that, at its core, was really fun." A Handcrafted Look After months of development, Martel came to realize that the only way to fully realize the type of game that the group had envisioned from the start was to revise the aesthetic. "It was a pretty extreme deci- sion," says Martel, who, along with some artists and level designers, crafted a proto- type, and won everyone over (see "Chang- ing Gears," pg. 16). e style Gearbox shifted to is one that is "graphic novelish," not car- toonish" (see "Game Art," this page). Dur- ing the changeover, though, the group was determined not to throw away the work that it had already done. "We had just spent a lot of time building all the assets," says Martel. For the most part, the crux of the transformation involved retexturing all the assets the artists already had. " en our world began evolving further, and we had to make new objects, each of which had its own look and feel," he adds. " at led to the characters having a more ex- treme and cool look. Each change would beget another." While the revision was radical, overall, the processes to get from pseudo-photo- realistic to handcrafted were less daunt- ing than one might think, contends Brian Cozzens, technical art director. Once the foundation for the new style was set, the implementation of the new direction occurred relatively quickly: Incorporating the necessary new technologies required approximately six weeks of de- velopment. " e The settings in Borderlands have an "American Wild West meets science fi ction" feel; the artists created the environments in this hybrid fi rst-person shooter/role-playing game by using a combination of mainly 3ds Max and Modo. Conceptualizing Gearbox's investigation into the origins of Borderlands' art style started with the concept art. The group questioned, says Brian Cozzens, technical art director, "What if we were to take our concept art and convert that directly into a 3D creation, with all its imperfections, exaggeration, and over-emphasis?" Most concept art used for making assets is perfected upon creation—it is a more perfect product than what is conceptualized. "But with translating our concept art into the game verbatim, we can include ink splatter, softly traced lines, and imperfect ink strokes—elements that would never be perfectly painted and strokes that would never be perfectly connected," explains Cozzens. Concept art is usually meant to be drawn quickly. To communicate a high-level idea, it's not about the perfection of the drawing itself, Cozzens points out. "But that's what's so at- tractive about concept art, it can be loose and free-thinking," he adds. "So what happens when that becomes a three-dimensional scene of concept art that you can walk around in and explore? And you can see all the wonderful dirty and imperfect parts? It gives elements as mundane as a steel barrel, character." –KM