Greetings, everyone!
We'll look back at some of the work we contributed to Project Dragon one last time. If you've missed our the previous features on the concept work and the 3D env/prop assets we did, we suggest you check those first to have a better context for today's portfolio drop.
Project Dragon was a multiplayer sandbox action-adventure that was in the making at Phoenix Labs. Picture something like Minecraft meets Breath of the Wild sprinkled with some elements from games like Stardew Valley, set in a universe not based on any existing IP. We got to contribute a lot of concepts, 3D environment assets, props, and 3D characters work over the course of 3 years. Sadly, the game was canceled a short while ago.
While it breaks our hearts that you will never get to see Dragon (a codename, obviously) in its fully realized form, we're grateful that we are allowed to show the art we contributed, providing a glimpse at this wonderful and whimsical world that we loved to work on alongside a terrific team at Phoenix Labs that we loved to work with.
Today we shall set our sights on the 3D character work we did on Project Dragon.
When we joined the project, the internal 3D team at Phoenix Labs was still relatively small. Our first mission was to do a first benchmark character based on a concept by Nicola Saviori.
After another player character or two, yours truly worked on few enemies to populate the build and have something for the players to fight against. Afterwards, a number of heads were on the menu so that the dev team had some material to toy around with for the character customization system they had in mind.
While the first characters were still uniquely built, the artists and tech artists at Phoenix Labs eventually devised a modular system to allow for the combination of different outfits, heads, hair styles and other faction-specific elements, and different body types among other things. The approach also made it very easy to modify textures and materials, so coming up with variants for outfits or creatures became another part of the workflow which the 3D artists had a grand time with.
What was the result like? How about we have a brief look at the character editor that the players could access. (Note: the videos were recorded from a WIP development screenshot, so scope, polish and UI/UX were not final in any way.)
When you check out our gallery, you'll largely 3D character assets of the following variety:
- Player outfits: a variety of general and culture-specific outfits the players could pick for their character
- Heads: same as above
- NPC outfits: outfits/looks for specific NPCs the players would encounter while exploring the world. They largely utilized the same system player characters were based on and didn't have the bespoke heads yet that you may have seen in some of the concepts. Those were yet to come.
- Enemies: well...
- Pets: by crafting specific treats, the players would have been able to tame pets! Most of which are mindboggingly adorable.
- Critters: smaller (but also highly adorable) creatures that the players could catch.
- Mounts: an assortment of (yes, adorable) creatures the players could unlock through quests to traverse the world a bit faster
- Oca: He's a special fella! Not sure if a character in an unreleased game can be deemed 'iconic', but that's what Oca would have been. And we were honored to do 3D work on him.
Please give it up for the team of wonderful 3D artists who did character work on Project Dragon on our end!
Andrea Orioli (Lead)
Florentine Postema (Co-Lead)
Chloé Labbé
Christian Fischer
Janneke Bruijnes
Levi John
Luc Narat
Malte Sturm
Nathan Bertelo
Steffen Unger
Theoni Fotoglou
Yuri Konoplov
It bears repeating, but the team at Phoenix Labs was an absolute joy to work with from day one to the bitter end. A special character-related shout-out and group hug is to be directed towards the great Josh Nadelberg, Lucas St. Martin and Megan Gritzfeld for their support and input, Adam Gibson for his tech-art wizardry that made many things easier or possible to begin with, Tanner Roberts, Danny Williams, the VFX magicians and the animators at Phoenix Labs and Funkeyz who completely knocked it out of the park. And Project Dragon was a treasure trove of fantastic and whimsical character/creature concept work for which we owe a debt of gratitude to Nicholas Kole, Camille Peyrebere, and Nicola Saviori among others.
Concluding notes
If you head over to our Project Dragon gallery, you see 3 years worth of vis-dev, R&D, and art production work. That would have been impossible without the helpful former leading members of the Dragon and ExDev teams at Phoenix Labs who made it their mission that former employees and partners would be allowed to show their work from Dragon and other cancelled projects. That's nothing to be taken for granted in an industry that is brim with buried projects as many of you will know only too well. For that, we cannot thank them enough. While you won't be able to play the game, you at least can get an inkling of the creativity and joy that went into it.
On that note: Project Dragon wasn't just a chunk of art assets, an idea on paper or a prototype at the time it was cancelled as some of the comments we saw assumed. It was a full game in its fourth year of development that even had an announcement date set when the axe came down on it and other projects at the studio.
Anyway, let's enjoy some delicious art, no? As with the previous features - below is only a tiny excerpt from the work we did. If you want to see it all, please head over here!
