This week’s Runescape Behind The Scenes is about one of the projects I’ve enjoyed the most this year: the update of Al-Kharid, one of the oldest cities in the Runescape world map.
The reason I’m so fond of this city is that it’s one of the few projects I worked on recently that I can really feel “mine”.
My current duties keep me away from my Wacom more often than not, whereas for this update I actually managed to get my hands dirty with quite a bunch of concepts.

I haven’t been able to post them yet, you can see a few of them in this video.
The big ugly face speaking with a strong Joe Pesci accent is my own.

Building over the old environment was a bitch (well-spoken people would say “a challenge”). The fun kind of challenge though.
Thing is, the place was old, like painfully old, and the common feeling in the Runescape Graphics Team was to bulldoze the place and build a shiny new city over its smouldering ruins.
Obviously this couldn’t be done, Al-Kharid is full of content, quests and things to do, and players wouldn’t have been happy had we been too drastic. So what we did instead was tiptoe around the untouchable bits, keep the important ones in their place and design pretty things on the rest.

We soon found out that designing an entire city almost from scratch offered some interesting possibilities. We could control how players would approach it, what they could see first, where to lead their eye, what feelings we could convey and why.
We could also follow a logic, some sort of real life city-plan, something difficult to do when you’re working on an established environment you’re adding new bits to.

Al-Kharid is now obviously built with materials available in the surrounding area, the crumbly red sand-stone mined from the hills.
The buildings are bare and poorly decorated, as the incessant winds and sands would erode any exposed surface in just days.
Moreover, the unbearable heat would more likely keep al-kharidians indoors, which is where they show their love for beauty, precious materials and colours.

In order to have all the elements working together I had to mock up the city in 3D first (I’ll post some Sketchup models soon) and constantly check with modellers and animators that everything was in good order.
Oddly enough this was the fun part. I spent more than a week talking to people in other departments and making sure my ideas were feasible, before I could even think of drawing a line. Ideas came to other people, advice was given, suggestions were made and only after did the concepts come. There was a “good energy”, if you forgive me the vaguely New-Age term, and I think it’s reflected by the quality of the environment we made.

It took more than a month for the entire Runescape Concept Artists team to design the place. I worked mostly on the city footprint and the environments, the others made all the characters, the indoors and the throng of props that populate the area.
Modellers were so quick at building the place that we could barely keep up with them, nonetheless it took some time.
It was a massive effort and I can’t wait for players to see it. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some of the environment concepts shortly.