Introducing the developer diary for our “Accursed Warlock Skull” Live Spirit! Inspired by dark fantasy, we envisioned this floating skull to belong to a powerful being who’s malicious energy was too powerful to accept death so they live on as a skull. This is evident as our warlock lives on with most of their magical abilities intact. Let us follow the sound of death and decay as we acquire a closer look at the development process behind our Malicious entity.
Early Sketches: Finding the right proportions
The initial sketch of our Warlock is much bigger than the final sprite, this was done to help visualize the details and shapes before downscaling. With the final design, we went with a less sinister face but still captured the essence of evil by having the eye sockets slightly closed with a furrowed brow. It’s also important to note that with a more neutral expression we are able to animate the skull’s expression that matches the action taking place.
For Abilities: I wanted eyebeams for sure
With the overall design of our Warlock set in bone, our artist Stonecoat wanted to make sure eye beams were included in the spell list, with the rest of the ideas following after that. One of them having our dark caster meditating, which took a great deal of layering enough little particle animations. This brought the whole spell to life according to Stonecoat as the final design was better than he expected.
Designing Animations: Most challenging was the spectral body.
Despite being one of our smaller spirits, our Accursed Warlock Skull needed to show off that in due time he could manifest a body that was more powerful than his feeble mortal one. Not to mention larger. Manifesting his spectral body has to be one of my favorites since at first glance one might underestimate how strong our Warlock really is.
In the end, we felt pretty satisfied with how our Accursed Warlock Skull turned out. Definitely a spirit that I can see appearing to be nothing more than a floating skull but the moment a notification rings out, our Warlock will show off just how powerful he is to your audience. We look forward to seeing this new edition to future livestreams.
Showcase: Behold the End Result
In closing, there you have the creative journey of our “Accursed Warlock Skull” Live Spirit. We hope this dark creation pushes the boundaries of what types of spirits we create. Shifting the norm from typical high fantasy to something more dark and foreboding. We hope this behind-the-scenes peek at our development process gives you insight as to how we create our animations and we hope to bring you more. Until then, tread carefully, and beware the gaze of death as you might join the ranks soon enough. Happy Streaming!
