WinterLeaf Entertainment MMO Character Artwork Update #1

Hi everybody. I thought I would just blog where WinterLeaf Entertainment is with our MMO artwork as we have been working on this for a while now behind the scenes.

WinterLeaf Entertainment is preparing its MMO development suite for people wanting to make their own MMO games, as well as using our work to produce our own MMO game based upon the torque engine. In creating our MMO game and development suite we are producing MMO specific character, weapons and environment artwork, a lot of which we will release as art packs for the torque community. However, before releasing our artwork we are really interested in what the MMO torque community want from their artwork. I have set out some general discussion pointers below and welcome peoples objective views.

Our first pack is a character pack that will allow people to change clothing, items and armour etc. We have been working on this for quite some time now perfecting the mesh swapping technique that we use. Hopefully the great many hours we have spend getting this to work nicely will save other people a great deal of time with getting their own games under way.

We have created our characters from a number of parts that are all interchangeable and animated to the same skeleton. This allows people to swap clothing and armour very easily, as is the standard requirement of most MMO games. It also allows people to use common animation for a great variety of character looks. We have achieved some very good results through our testing stages in the torque engine and are now entering the final push to make sure everything is a good as it can be.

Below is an early version of our concept main human character with some early set of clothing. Things have advance significantly since this. He is set in an area of our early concept environment art.








While poly count and texture sizes are important and we are optimising those elements (the characters above are under 2k polys), I would welcome people's views on the following gaming elements.

1. what types of clothing/armour do people want?

2. what accessories do people want on their character?

3. should clothing/armour be fantasy race specific or generally the same across all races?

4. are detailed facial characters important in MMO gameplay? If so what level of adjustment is important?

5. anything else that people want to see?

We will be releasing updates in the coming weeks on how this is progressing but before doing so we really wanted to take soundings from the MMO community.

Or intention is to release our main character pack followed by supplementary artwork that will include weapons, items, environments etc, the focus of which will all be MMO specific.

So when will this be released? We are looking to release this very soon, but we are an indie group like many and are working as fast as our spare time allows and will only release this when the quality is good enough for us to use in our own MMO game, rather than rush something out quickly. That being said we expect it to be finished very soon.

I'll be releasing a series of blogs over the next 4-6 weeks updating on this as well as how other WLE artwork is progressing.

As an indie group we are, however, always keen to hear from anyone that wants to be involved in our wider MMO project. From an art perspective we have a huge project before us with the development of our own MMO game and are always looking for people who have an interest in MMO gaming to be involved in our project. I am very keen to hear from anyone that wants to be involved in a very enjoyable art project and be part of a small team that wants to produce top quality art. If you are interested in this and want to know more please drop me an email at tim (at) winterleafentertainment (dot) com.

Thanks for reading.

Tim