Some News and Some Mummies

I have been very, very lazy with my blog recently.

So much so that I haven’t even posted about some pretty big massive news about my new (umm what’s the word?) working situation?

Well, first off I’m not working at Jagex anymore.

No more Runescape, no more Friday Pub lunch with fellow Concept Artists and Art Director, no more amazing training days to London museums.

I had an amazingly good time at Jagex, and the people there are the best bunch I’ve ever worked with, I’ll truly miss a whole lot of them.

I know, people often say that when they leave a workplace, but I did leave some good friends behind, so it was quite tough to go away.

Good luck mates, I’m sure I’ll see some of you around (no really, this industry is ridiculously small, I met four ex-colleagues at the new job. I’m bound to work again with someone from Jagex at some point).

On the other hand, after more than four years on the same project and little more, I really needed a breath of fresh air, which is why I’m also very happy to work at Sumo now, on Little Big Planet.

I have just started, so it will be a long time before I will be able to post anything of what I’m doing here.

Plus, it’s also taking quite some time and effort to adapt to a completely new game, so well, don’t hold your breath for that.

Luckily, while clearing my machine the day I left, I found a whole bunch of Concepts I made for Runescape that I had neglected to share.

So it looks like I will have some material to post for the next few weeks (more about my recent laziness in my next post).

These three guys below are, as anyone can see, mummies.

I have no memory of where and when they were plugged into the game, if I remember correctly they were part of a big update, but for one reason or another they didn’t manage to go live for quite some time.

This is what one the old Mummies looked like, just so you know.

Modellers at Jagex did an amazing job translating the new mummies in 3D, but what made me jump up and down with joy were the animations.

Unfortunately I can’t find anything on the internet to link. If you happen to come across the new mummies with their animations give me a shout.

That’s all I have for now, I’ll post some more Runescape stuff in the near future.

by Paolo Puggioni

A Paladin Outfit for Runescape

This is a Paladin Outfit I made for Runescape.
Not much to say about it, it’s just a paladin armour.

Paladins are quite straightforward characters. They’re self righteous people with a thing against evil. As a matter of fact, I never could stand paladins in games or literature.
Self important, rigid blokes you can’t really argue with, and not particularly entertaining at the pub unless you fancy making fun of their bigotry (and possibly risk being cut in two by their holy sword during the process).

Ok, in games and books paladins usually speak directly to their deities, so there isn’t that “hey, who told you you’re good and I’m not” element that makes bigots so unpleasant in real life. Their answer would always be “my god did, really, now die”.

On the other hand, they tend to make game-play quite relaxing. Like “hey, there’s a guy dressed in black. And his armour has spikes and skulls, let’s kill him”. You don’t have to put too much thought into playing a paladin. If it’s evil it has to die, full stop.
Thieves and mercenaries are more fun, I’ve always thought.

This was an outfit destined for the shop, so the requirements were about a classic, quite iconic paladin armour.

The only slightly more unusual element I managed to slip in is its colour. Instead of the canonical, high reflective  steel armour I went for a white enamelled metal.
Which is, by the way, the kind of armour you would spend the most time cleaning.
Can you imagine how easily it would get dirty? If I lived in a Fantasy world I’d totally be a villain. You wear black and you don’t have to worry about stains.

Anyway, if I were to design an actual in-game paladin I’d try and convey the concept of a religious fanatic  a lot more.

To me a paladin is closer to an agent of the Spanish Inquisition than a good guy who learnt how to fight despite his distaste for violence.
I’d see Paladins as strict, close-minded people well determined to crush any opposition to their faith.
They would wear the sort of attire meant to scare infidels away, and possibly a hood, and cruel weapons.
They would carry symbols of their power, and be vocal in their convictions. And they would roam the land and mindlessly destroy anything they consider wrong, and maybe hang trophies of slain enemies on their armour, just to be sure their intentions are clear.

That would be a paladin I would play in a game. If I weren’t so fond of stealth and deception. And the occasional collateral damage.

by Paolo Puggioni

Runescape Update – The Chaos Tunnels

Last Week we updated a pretty old Runescape area, the Chaos Tunnels.
The update also included the Brimhaven Dungeon, the Fremennik Slayer Dungeon and the Taverley Dungeon.

Beneath the southern areas of theWilderness, north of Varrock is a warren of caves, linked by mysterious portals. Delved from the rock by the power of chaotic magic, a strange enchantment holds sway over its tunnels and passages, drawing evil to it like a moth to a flame. For this reason, perhaps, the range of creatures within the Chaos Tunnels is far greater than you might expect.

Whatever its origin, it is certain that the caves are tainted by the dark hands of Zamorakian magic…

The Concept Artists Team worked on this whole bunch of environments (plus an awful amount of things yet to be released) pretty much at the same time, early this year.
Each one of us worked on a separate dungeon, so of course I’ll be posting only the artwork I’m responsible of. But you can find more in my friend and colleague’s website.

I was supposed to work on more underground areas as well, then I had to move to the Al Kharid rework, which took me quite some time.

Here’s a video of the environments in game.
Btw, No offence to the Runescape fan who posted it but I had to silence the music. Not my cup of tea:)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W_FZo1IjaA

The environments look nice in game. However, as you might have noticed I had designed the floors with a more irregular, uneven look.
I hate flat surfaces, If I could have things my own way I’d change Runescape into some kind of Roller Coaster.
However, steps and cracks on the floor are quite polygon expensive, and modellers often have to even things out to prevent the FPS from being unhappy.
This Dungeon is visited by many players at the same time, so I guess that was one of those cases.

The NPC are still quite dated. We’ll take care of them at some point!

by Paolo Puggioni

Runescape Concepts – Al Kharid

A few weeks ago we released a Runescape Behind the scenes outlining the imminent update of Al Kharid, one of the oldest areas of the game.

The project is maybe the one I enjoyed the most this year. The challenges we had to face were many, and updating the city without breaking the existing content felt at times like defusing a landmine.
The old Al Kharid looked pretty much like a bunch of scattered houses, and not a city at all.
What we had in mind instead, was a grand place bolstering with activity, a hub for travellers and merchants crossing the desert, with the palace of the Prince at its center.

Given the scale of the project I thought it would have been easier to mock up the entire area in 3D first, to avoid issues down the line. This way I could also have control over the overall shape of the city, how roads and building would lead the players to the points of interest, and most importantly how to convey the feel that the Art Director wanted Al Kharid to have.

It took several days of back and forth to other departments (environment modellers and animators have been heavily involved in the concept phase) before we came up with a layout that could actually work.
Only after everyone was happy with the model (which I forgot to take home, alas)  I could start with the proper drawings.

For the first time in Runescape we built a city with a self consistent logic, with actual city things going on, and a proper city plan.
The houses are now obviously built with materials available in the surrounding area, the crumbly red sandstone the neighbouring hills are made of.
Their walls are bare and scarcely decorated, since the sand and the incessant winds would wear every exposed surface in a matter of days.
The indoors are instead where al Kharidian would spend the most of their time, and are usually rich and full of comforts.
Al Kharid has defensive walls now, to keep away enemies and possibly the harsh weather, and guards patrol the battlements to keep the citizens safe.

Right past the main gate there’s the market, where merchants and travellers sell their wares and exchange news.
The buildings at the outskirts are quite small, while they get taller and taller approaching the palace to emphasise the slope of the hill the city is built on.
This is something that I believe will impress Runescape players quite a bit. There aren’t many high places in the game, and the view from the Prince’s Palace is now quite stunning.

In hindsight, if I were to draw these concepts today I would do a much better job (they’re quite a few months old now). The deadline ended up being quite tight in the end, and I had to take many shortcuts, among which pasting all over the place the facades we had already designed, which gave everything a slightly artificial look.
But hey, I dished out an environment and a half every day so I can’t really complain.

Anyway, I’ll post the rest of the AL Kharid concepts later this week, with the Palace and the rest.

by Paolo Puggioni

Some Runescape Weapons

I was recently allowed to bring home some of the weapons I designed for Runescape, some of which for the Crucible.

The Crucible is one of the latest PvP areas of Runescape.
We released it a few months ago, and as it happened often in the past few months it was a project I was REALLY looking forward to, which I had to abandon after just a couple of concepts to work on something else.

My friend Dave and I worked quite a lot on planning the area so that all the design requirements were met.
The Crucible is a sort of underground arena, set up by rogues on the ruins of a pre-existing ancient dungeon.
We had to convey a certain feeling of danger and uneasiness, make it as cool as possible and at the same time keep the poly count as low as possible because of the massive amount of players playing at the same time.

It took a few days of sketching, planning, and of going back and forth to the various departments of Runescape graphics to double check that our ideas weren’t too crazy.
This is usually one of the parts I like best.
Then, by the time I was ready to start sketching, I had to start working on something else:(

Anyway, I got back to the project just in time to draw a few weapons, so here’s all I’ve got of the Crucible.

The following are instead a couple of weapons (a weapon and a shield actually) I designed for the Runescape MTX shop.

I’ll close with something I remember little about. It’s a Runic Staff, but I’ll be damned if I remember what I did it for:(

Runescape Concepts: Godwars Characters part 2

Here are another couple of Runescape characters I did for the Godwars dungeon.
Now that I think of it, together with Graardor that’s all I did for this project.

Bree and Growler are both Commanders Zyliana’s body guards.

Zylyana has been designed by my good friend Dave, btw.

Commander Zilyana, Keeper of Faith, is the leader of Saradomin’s army in the God Wars Dungeon.
She is an Icyene, an ancient race of winged beings, chosen by Saradomin to guard his hilt.

[Again: source]

Bree, as you might have guessed by the four-legged lower part of his body, is a centaur.
He is one of the only three centaurs of the entire Runescape.
I’m told animators are quite happy of the race being neglected in our game, apparently they’re not the easiest thing to move around.
As far as I’m concerned I’m also quite content to keep their number as low as possible.
Horses are not the easiest thing to draw either, you know.

(Fun fact: artists have been crap at drawing horses in movement until Edweard Muybridge’s first action photos. There was obviously no way to isolate single frames to take reference until then. There’s an article about it on James Gurney’s blog. Oddly enough, being an old time fan of Muybridge’s work, I already knew about these facts. My brain has its own way to decide with information to retain and what not. I can’t remember my own mobile number, for example).

Growler is another one of the three bodyguards.
Apparently he is not much of a threat and Runescape players normally manage to kick all the Life out of him without breaking their stride.

Now, to be fair, at this point I should post the last of Zyliana’s bodyguards, Starlight, but I was so unhappy about the concept that I decided it should remain buried where it is.
As another horse-like creature, this unicorn is not so much to my liking.

The model looks great though.

Runescape Behind The Scenes: The New Al-Kharid

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.

Runescape Reaches 200 Millions Accounts

Last Thursday Runescape reached the 200 Millions Accounts mark.
Not bad for a game which has been around for more than ten years eh?

If I’m not wrong we’re also in for a Guinness world record.
Which is cool, because I like the idea of winning a Guinness record without having to do something outright crazy like eating a van full of sausages or things like that.

Anyway, we have a big huge monitor in the hall at Jagex, with a counter reading the Runescape accounts created. Same as the one you see on our website.
On Thursday all the Runescape team gathered in front of the screen waiting for THE MOMENT, then everyone cheered at the 200 millionth account, and there was a party and everything.

Everyone but me I mean, and the other Concept Artists.
We were out of office for our training, damn it.
Really, crap, we totally missed it.
I won’t even post what we drew for our training because screw it.
Happy for the result though, I hope EVERYONE ELSE enjoyed the moment.

Now that I think of it this post is making me sad, you could have waited another day to register those new accounts, dear players. I’ve been looking at that counter for weeks, thinking “hey nearly there!”.
Damn it.

Anyway, big success. There are articles about it on pretty much all the gaming websites.
This is the article on Kotaku, then Videogamer.com, Metro, and IGN amongst others.

However, it kind of sucks that they all posted 7-8 years old graphics and not the new, shiny, pretty ones we are releasing now.
Oh well.

This is an info-graphic we’ve been preparing for a while.
I think the data displayed are pretty impressive.
Congratulations Runescape, I hope that for the 300 Millions celebrations I’ll be at my desk.

by Paolo Puggioni

The Runescape Combat Update

The Runescape Combat Update has finally been rolled out, which is one of the projects we’ve been working on for quite some time.

“Quite some time” hardly describes the awful amount time spent by the Graphics Team concepting, modelling and animating the throng of assets involved in the update, not to mention all the other teams’ effort to make it work smoothly.

As everyone was aware of, the models the game was using were dated and didn’t support enough bones to allow smooth animations.

Now, you might have noticed, characters even have fingers instead of pink coloured eskimo gloves!
Adapting the assets to the combat update forced modellers to cut and readapt all the old objects, and do all sort of stuff we concept artists are hugely happy not to be involved with.
The Runescape Combat Update was a huge effort, believe me.

Which is why I can’t wait to hear our player’s opinions about this update, since the new combat system will change Runescape quite considerably (hopefully for the better).

The update includes dual wielding, actual combat stances, special attacks and lots of other things Runescape players have been waiting for, for a long time.
Right now only the privileged who signed up for the beta will have the chance to try it out, but they will be followed shortly by all the rest.

Mod Chris L and Hunter explain what’s going on in the following video .
I’m sure you’ll find other videos in the next few days with players having fun with it.

by Paolo Puggioni

Life Drawing At The British Museum

Yesterday my fellow Concept Artists and I went to the British Museum in London for our third monthly training session.
Before you start scrolling down I have to break it to you: I didn’t even scribble a stick man.
The mass of tourists was aggressive enough to discourage the most motivated artist.

The rooms were people weren’t punching each other on the face to get a place in front of the artefacts weren’t interesting enough to go fetch a chair and take all the gear outside of my bag, so I eventually gave up.
Plus, damn I’m getting old and my feet were killing me.

Nonetheless the trip was fruitful and illuminating.
I mean, I took 428 reference pictures, I can’t wait to find an excuse to smuggle all the props and objects I found even slightly interesting into Runescape.

The rooms I found most worthy of attention were the Aztec and the African.
I knew little to nothing about ancient South American artefacts, and I was impressed by the power of their designs.
My wife would have gone nuts wih all that lapis lazuli blue everywhere.

Apart from that, I made a mental note to look deeper into meso american ancient art, the way they break down complex scenes into simple shapes is rather unique.
Plus, the gruesome nature of their favourite subject matters (like, Queen Something Something performing the ritual of sticking ten feet of barbed wire through her tongue) never fails to entertain.

African art was just as much a surprise. You can easily see some of the faces of their carvings in Picasso’s paintings. He was almost certainly impressed by their natural skill in simplifying, decomposing and reassembling shapes.
Unfortunately when I got there I had already been in the Museum for close to six hours, so I couldn’t be asked to take my sketchbook out.
I promised to myself to go back and spend a day just in those two rooms, which are luckily neglected by the tourist throng.

by Paolo Puggioni