Ancestral greetings my humanoid kin, for this Dev Diary I’d like to discuss the process of summoning this DLC to life. Be warned it is an image heavy thread! The art team, specifically the Art Director (me) the Concept Artists along with the Creative Director, are the first to explore the DLC. Through the ideation process of moodboards, keywords and rough sketches we set out by exploring the big questions - Are we alone in the universe, what mood do we want to convey, what are the visual gaps we want to fill, and what would our players love?

Your Culture

When it comes to Primal Fury we knew we wanted a new Wild nature affinity themed culture. We started with some early mood exploration, playing with a neolithic vibe combined with animism, spirituality and tribal motifs.

As designers join the team we start to solidify a visual identity. We knew we wanted to fill the Nature affinity culture gap, but at the same time introduce a new way to play via sub-cultures. We thought about how we might introduce these visually through animals, weapons and costume. We then start to concept potential lineups and unit types.

This changes rapidly as we hone in on a direction, we put basic 3D blockouts in game and push to introduce new weapons. Instead of a ranged unit using a bow how about we use a blowdart weapon? We explore avenues to bring in new ways to play with existing unit types. This meant having to create new poses and animation sets as it comes with it’s own unique abilities.

Wild culture weapon exploration.

After iterations we end up with a lineup we’re happy with. Each unit role and tier is communicated clearly, and differently from one another. We have clear material definition and customization options such as player and armour colour. We split up trinkets like jewelry, furs and bones so we can reuse them for leader customization.

We then take these 2D concepts and translate them into 3D by sculpting digital clay, notice in the texture of the double handed axe how the blade is really bright, this helps communicate readability in combat.

We wanted a way to show the sub-culture animal picks across your units so we made weapon variants to visualize this, for instance your support units magical staff or melee units shield swaps out depending on if you chose the path of the Storm Crow, or Dune Serpent etc.

Additionally we create new skin decorations that fit the culture, we test to make sure that they not only look good on humanoids but also the 13 other forms we have.

An example of leaders you can create:

Your City

Your city has 4 visual tiers, it should also show what wall defenses have been built, and have room for units and a wizard tower to spawn ontop. To communicate this we have a clear breakdown and composition of how a city is made. Firstly, the main tower which acts as the focal point. When it comes to the wild city we opted for a capstone that would switch it’s visual based on the sub-culture pick. Next we use secondary and tertiary towers, playing with scale and bridges to lead the eye to the center. We then place very small houses around to really push the scale of the city. Lastly we add particle FX like smoke, torches and fireflies, again these are coloured towards your sub-culture pick.

House and Tower concepts.

Wild city sieges need unique wall and house visuals with destructible variants, the lighting and biome will change depending on city location.

Your Forms

From day 1 fans have been asking for a dog form, unfortunately we can’t make every dog breed so we decided to narrow it down to what we call the doge form, here’s the initial concept art and sculpt based off of our very own Senior Dragon Artist, Maki.

Just kidding! Instead we wanted to push for more of a beast vibe that tied well into the Primal Fury theme, so we opted for Lupine and Goatkin, more of a wolverine aesthetic and demon-goat vibe with really interesting silhouettes and horn customization, here’s some early artwork exploration and in-game shots.

We thought it would be a cool addition to add some extra life to these forms, so we added small ear twitches, secondary animation like this adds so much extra character to your creations making them the goodest of boys.

Return of the Naga

We wanted to test a new method of Major Transformations that we haven’t done before, and that's mixing in different animals into your form, being a half-something…. For instance with the Naga half snake and half form choice. What would you call a half Snake half Goatkin creature? We achieve this by essentially scaling down the legs to 0 and animation blending the top humanoid half with a custom bottom snake half. This also opens up interesting opportunities for future transformations down the line, what other half humanoid creatures can you think of that you’d love to see come to the game?

Your Wildlife

We really wanted to push the Neolithic vibe here with Mammoths and Sabretooth Tigers. We go through the same pipeline with wildlife as we do with characters, first starting with rough concepts and blockout 3D. If we introduce a new rig and animation set we think about how we can get the most out of it, in this instance it made sense to also introduce an elephant as a variant so we could get the most out of the content being created. Some early Elephant and Mammoth ideas:

Part of the art direction of wildlife is to capture the essence and character, much like a caricature portrait pushes proportions and expression to elicit a feeling. Below we see a small scribble from Picasso and a picture of a real pig, personally I find Picasso’s drawing of a pig more fun than the actual pig photo. We try to use this as an example to push expression through our characters to make them more interesting. Here we see the wolf’s proportion, snarl and pose bring about the essence of what a wolf is more so than what a photo would.

Here we see that same art direction principle applied to the Sabretooth, it’s snarl really showing why this animal was called a Smilodon

We also experimented around with shader effects and  scrolling glowing glyph textures to create the Primal Animal effects.

We’re also getting some cool new Tome units like the Racial Stormbringer and the cute fae Mistling creature (I won’t spoil everything here, you’ll find more wildlife surprises in-game!)

Your Mounts

We heard you! You guys love mounts, so we really made an effort to bring you some cool variations that play into the Primal theme. We can’t wait to see what empires you create with these beasts!

These mounts will be available as unlockable rewards in the pantheon tree, and available to all players of the game!

Your Icons & Interface

I’d like to take some time here to highlight iconography and interface. What I find astounding is that every icon here represents a new gameplay concept with localized descriptive tooltips, and coded gameplay. There might also be additional animation or particle FX with bespoke audio.

Tome artworks, 2 new tomes and 1 per starting Wild subculture.

We couldn’t have a Wild DLC without having a reskin of the UI frame to match, this will help immerse you in the game.

Bonus

We saw feedback on the forest visuals from the forums, and agreed with the sentiment. We decided this was the perfect time to take another stab at them by adding more variety and interest via additional meshes, particle FX and colour. Using previous Age of Wonders games as inspiration we added things like little mushrooms and cobwebs. Before everything was a drab range of greens, now have fall colours for the highlands biome, pinks for the arctic, every forest biome got a pass. We’ll continue to make an effort polishing the game, and adding variety when and where we can so please keep the feedback coming!

We’ve also spent some time polishing interfaces like adding additional parchment artwork headers and much much more!

Finally, not everybody likes changing their units visuals, either Enchantments, Minor or Major transformations. To address this we’ve added a Toggle Visibility button to the Active Spells page of your Spellbook. The only visualizations that we can’t toggle are those that grant you wings (for gameplay purposes).

That’s all folks! We really hope you enjoy Primal Fury and getting a sneak peak behind what goes into creating a DLC content pack. If your hungry for more art please check out dev diary #11 The Art of Age of Wonders 4 dev diary here