Archive for March, 2009
Designing realistic environments from scratch

Rosetta is a small town nestled in the mountains, caught between the modern world and antiquity. Its natural places remain largely untouched, even when civilization brushes up against them.

We wanted an environment that depicted the place where the city of Rosetta met the forests of Rosetta. It was natural that this would be a transition environment, a place the characters pass when moving from one area to another. For this we chose a simple road on the mountain’s edge.

“Simple” is one of those famous last words.

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Vivienne Carter promo art

We’re nearing the end of our first major arc, and to celebrate we have some new wallpapers. This time we’ve got Vivienne, aka Vivi, relaxing and introspecting on a sunny day in the woods. For those curious, that is in fact a bobcat.

We have a wide selection of resolutions, so choose the one that works for you:

Full-screen:
800 x 600
1024 x 768
1280 x 960
1280 x 1024
1600 x 1200

Wide-screen:
1280 x 800
1440 x 960
1680 x 1050
1920 x 1200
2560x 1600

Background art from photographs

Mystery Parfait is a small team and we’re always looking for ways to shorten our development time. Before a final sketch is made, art pieces go through an initial design process. Because it’s easier to change things at this stage, our goal is to get most of the edits out of the way before continuing on to sketch, line art, and color.

For complicated backgrounds, this process can turn into a real nightmare. Perspective is hard and half the team tends to be picky. For this and other reasons, we decided to get photo references for backgrounds and modify them as needed.
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