I had the pleasure to work with Wrecko, a small boutique game studio, starting the ambitious project Mage Wars. Mage War was to be a fantasy tablet game with interesting gameplay mechanics and customisable spells. I was called in early to supply the first visuals for their rich universe. Unfortunatly, after close to a year of pre-production, and a few convincing playabe prototypes, they were forced to shutdown due to financial issues.
Wrecko Studios Concept Art
Concept & Key art from the project Mage Wars for Wrecko Games Studio
Characters & Creatures
Design and Research for Mage Wars’ world inhabitants
Main hero character, a Mage from the powerful Phoenix guard
The Dark Purge wizard, the antagonist faction’s hero character
Mage Wars was to be a top-down perspective view tablet game, most of the early designs had to accommodate in level of details, proportions and computing ressources
Rock Golem research, One of the many spells the player could use to vanquish enemies
The Lupari Shaman, powerful ally from a tribe venerating the wolf spirit
Sissilissk, a humanoid tribe based on snakes quick and agile warriors covered in armor
Drek soldier, most common antagonist met by the player
Volcanic Gorilla Golem research, a customisation option for the player’s golem spell. But also to go to golem spell for the Dark Wizard antagonist
Props
Props and Devices research
Props were an interesting challenge – 2016 tablets being limited in computing power, the props had to be interesting and simple and rely on animation for richness instead of details and finish. All in the spirit of keeping cpu and memory ressources to a minimum
The game revolved around gathering Marhu as a power source from pools on the map. The pools needed to be mined and protected, so a lot of research was done around their gameplay loops
Mahru pool defenses research sketches
Environments
Design and Research for Mage Wars world
Dark forest research, the first main Biome encountered by the player
Spells and VFX
Design and Research for Mage Wars Visual FX
Spells look and gameplay development
Art Direction
Guidance and support given to the Wrecko crew to help up the quality of the produced assets
Being the principal 2D artist, after a while, I also became defacto part time Art director on the project, helping out the young crew during art reviews. I had to comment the work and produce paintover and other references material as necessary
