I've got a question about environmental art!
When you're designing a new area, like, say, a new castle, how much planning do you do? Do you go from concept sketches through to physical mock-ups on a grid and then into the game with tiles, or do you have another program that you "draft" environments in before you toss them on UO, or some sort of test server, or something else? Please feel free not to answer this if it's company secrets. (I am really interested in environmental game art as an eventual career.)
Also, if you do concept sketches... any chance we could ever get to see one or two? :3
Well, actually, world building isn't handled by the art department. Weird, but there you go. World building is managed by our design folks - although the Gargoyle City was done by a world building artist, and while I think it really shows, I think we get the best results with art and design working together. Jeff is working to try and bridge the work from design and art on world building.
But you are right - the best approach is to work everything out on paper first, review, and at the very end implement. Working stuff out on paper saves SO much time on what's called the "Iterative Loop".
-Grimm
