Behind the Scenes: Medieval Tavern
Added 2024-03-26 07:58:07 +0000 UTC
I've been watching a lot of town building and resource management strategy game videos for the past months and I always find myself admiring the structures and building design. Whether it's a full 3D modern engine game, or a pre-rendered sprite design, it often inspires me to think about the different building styles and how I would make them.
So I decided to reboot one of my older series with this theme, and go and make more detailed, while still very stylized strategy game building design. I looked through few of the older designs and found a cute tavern structure, so I picked it as a place to start.
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I browsed the web and Pinterest for some more inspiration and built a Pinterest board to save anything I might come across. I didn't focus only on the 3D models and environments. On the contrary, I was more interested in 2D pixel art assets, pre-rendered sprites and painted images for the similar topic.
If you build your reference board only with existing 3D art, you're then inclined to think in the same way and copy the style more than you actually want. But if you surround yourself with ideas agnostic to the style you are going for, then you can clearly focus only on the content, and not necessarily the form.
I loved the idea of a barrel as an entrance in my older design, but I saw something similar in one of the references used as a roof over the entrance. I thought that's a nice way to push this idea further, so when sketching the design, I used only a part of the barrel cylinder and moved it further up. And I thought it would be a fun thing to leave an old metal valve in there, to really enforce this idea of a giant old beer barrel.
Few of the designs included a copper beer boiler on the side of the building and I really loved the idea so I sketched that in. That made the layout a little bit wide, so I compensated it by adding a small tower on the roof and also some metal chimney.
To make it more interesting and detailed, I included some outdoor things like a table with bench, a short fence and a cellar trap door.
You can watch the process video on Youtube.
