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CHRISTOPHER FRENTON
Runeboards
Working on a live game means that the art team is constantly pushing as much content as they can on a regular cadence. As an art director I was always looking for ways to create assets faster with as little degradation to quality as possible. An off-the-cuff joke about surfboards in a meeting that ran a little too long led to the implementation of 'Runeboards' as a re-occurring mount for our yearly summer event.
The summer event was always a bit lighthearted with its content so the idea of a magically enchanted plank of wood the player can ride like a surfboard fit in well.
These are the quick mock-ups to make sure that everyone was on the same page and I had something to show Wizards of the Coast when I pitched them the idea. The narrative conceit at this point was that an enterprising young wizard was using a Pennant of the Vind Rune to empower wooden planks with levitation capabilities. The wizard would commission work from the top artists of the Sword Coast and sell them to adventurers for a bit of gold.
After pitching the idea we built a "proof of concept". We adjusted the dimensions of the board and added the graphic. We also did our first pass on VFX. The FX where set up with easily adjusted variables to keep consistency and allow quick edits for future boards. You will notice that the vind rune was changed to a transmutation rune. This gave us a little more room to play around with the narrative since the Pennant of the Vind Rune came with very specific lore.
Art by Chris Dien
Coming
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Coming
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After setting up the pipeline in the initial Runeboard release the following releases went swimmingly. The bulk of the time went to the illustrations. However, if needed there are ways to reduce time spent on that. The Clockmaker board was actually created from an old concept piece for our clockmaker dungeon.
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