Now that we know a little more about the way A Kingdom for Keflings is played let's find out how the crew at NinjaBee arrived at the finished style of AFKF.  For that, there's no better person to ask than Brent Fox, NinjaBee's Art Director.  Luckily, he's taken a few minutes out to answer my questions. 

After the break, discover more about the process of making a game's world metamorphose from visual concept to finished product.  We talk about artists, iterations, avatars, and even that mysterious NinjaBee style.

LunarDuality: How many concept artists does NinjaBee employ on any particular project?

Brent Fox: We assigned one artist as the main concept artist on A Kingdom for Keflings but we had three or four other artists contribute in this area at various times throughout the project. Each project has different amounts and styles of concept art that is needed so the number of artists that we assign varies a lot on each project.

LD: So, give me a rough estimate for the number of iterations a piece of concept art goes through from initial concept to polished reference. And how many different pieces are drafted?

BF: It really depends on what piece of art we are talking about. If we are talking about nailing down the initial look, we go through a lot more iterations. We fill sketchbooks with hundreds of sketches before we settle in on the perfect look. Once this basic look has been established the process for the rest is much faster. However, we still went through a lot of iterations on each individual piece of art. For example, I would guess that the average number of iterations on each individual building was at least 3 or 4. We might have nailed a couple in the first try but we certainly spent much more time on many of the buildings.
We try and pay particular attention to the early sketches. It much easier to change a sketch than a final model after it’s placed in the game. I’m sure all of our artists get frustrated at how picky we can be and how many times they need to redraw something. However, without this painful process our games wouldn’t look as good.

LD: How long does it take for a piece of art to go from initial idea to concept art and then to 3D model?

BF: Again, the time it takes to go from concept to final in-game art varies wildly depending on what piece of art we are talking about and what stage of development we are at. We spend a lot of time on characters. They are more complex and require much more work to be done if they are going to animate correctly in-game. On the other hand, once we have settled on an overall look, created several buildings that work in the game and can be considered final, and nailed down a sketch for a particular building, we can take that sketch and turn it into a final asset in less than a day. I find that getting the initial set of objects in the game can take months but once that first set is working everything speeds up. I would say that in a 10-month schedule, 80% of the art is done in the last 3 months.

LD: I have always noticed a certain stamp that identifies NinjaBee games. Humor is one part of that, but another part is the visual stamp (not that I could easily describe it). Do you think there is a NinjaBee style and if so, what does it look like?

BF: That’s an interesting observation. We certainly have heard a lot of people make this same comment. We work to establish a unique look for each game we make and I think we do a good job of giving all of our games their own visual personality. A Kingdom for Keflings doesn’t really look like any of our previous games. However, there is certainly a general visual style that ties all of our games together. One contributing factor is that, despite our conscious effort to create a new look for each game, the same group of artists are behind all of these games. Because of the diversity of all of our games this overall NinjaBee art style is hard to define. It’s much easier to define the art style of each of the individual games. I like to think that our art style fits well with the kind of games we like to make and play. They are fun, light-hearted and inviting to a large audience. If we ever choose to do a serious and dramatic game, I assume it would look very different.

LD: Where in time and space are the costumes, buildings, and world of AKFK set? Were there particular games, stories, periods, and/or works of art that inspired the look of the game?

BF: A Kingdom for Keflings takes place in a medieval environment. This is one of the aspects that we spent a lot of time working out in the initial concept stage. This time period and look seemed to sit well with the concept of a building a city with an avatar who was giant-sized. We actually showed some of our early concepts to people who gave us some advice. These early advisors made suggestion that we shouldn’t use a medieval setting and architectural style in the game. Marketers pointed out that most players would identify better with a modern day setting. They may have been right but in typical NinjaBee style, we thanked them but chose to ignore this advice, mostly because we thought that this medieval theme looked cool.

LD: A grid style of construction obviously informs the gameplay, but how did that inform the way the world was drawn?

BF: The grid system didn’t have much effect on the environment but it certainly had a big impact on the design of the buildings and building pieces. We faced a difficult challenge of designing interesting looking buildings that fit within a grid without making them look like they were designed for a grid system. We had to think about how many boxes would be filled by each building and the shape of the layout. The building needed to fill each of the grid pieces so that it made sense that an entire section was filled and another building couldn't fit there. I think we did a really good job considering this interesting challenge.

LD: Was it difficult to include the New Xbox Experience Avatars into the visual style of the game without losing the overall feel?

BF: When we originally talked about adding the new Avatars to our game, everyone thought it wouldn’t look right. The NXE Avatars are dressed in modern clothing and as we imagined them being placed in a medieval village, it didn’t seem like it would fit. However, we decided to give it a try. We created a simple mock-up by combining a scene from our current game with one of the new Avatars. As it turns out, it looked great. Everyone was easily convinced that it was actually a perfect fit when they saw this mock-up and the rest, as they say, is history.

LD: What was it like trying to animate the Avatars? Is the Avatar system built with animators in mind or was it an unexpected challenge?

BF: It was a big challenge. I’m sure it would be very simple if you built your game’s animation system around the Avatars. The problem was we already had an animation system working in our game that is very different from the Microsoft Avatar animation system. We weren’t even using the same software! Traditionally converting animations and skeletons from one piece of software to another proved quite problematic. We also had a short period of time to get things working. Luckily, we have some brilliant people on our team who did a lot of tedious work such as testing the naming of each bone and checking the results in our game. The good news is that we figured it out and we now have a great system for animating the NXE Avatars using the software and tools that we are familiar with.

Stay tuned.  Tomorrow we'll talk even more about playable avatars and what we can all look forward to tomorrow when we get the New Xbox Experience (and Keflings, of course)!