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Torment: Tides of Numenera - Art Team Q&A

by Silver, 2017-02-16 21:53:39

The Torment: Tides of Numenera art team has answered some fan questions on facebook.

Developer Insights - Art Team Q&A

Torment·Friday, 17 February 2017
We're back today with some answers from our Art Team regarding your questions. You asked some really thoughtful questions and we had an absolute pleasure answering them. We hope you're enjoying the inside scoop as much as we like providing it. Don't forget to tune in to our next Q&A to answer more of your questions!

Which critter or character in the game has the largest number of states/poses/animations?

The player characters have the most animations since they are essentially "in every scene." And as you might expect for a game like Torment that is mostly populated with bipeds, there is a fair amount of sharing of animation across the cast of characters. The creature with the most animation under the hood is the Sorrow fragment. This many-tentacled quadruped had to not only navigate but engage in combat with multiple attacks.

@ Concept Artist: During your work were you closer to the writers, or Monte Cook?

Monte Cook provided direct feedback for all aspects of the game, but for most of the day-to-day work the writers were our source for those critical details that were based on narrative or the lore of the Ninth World.

@ Storyboard Artists: Did you ever come up with any crazy angles or shots during conception that the director shut down in less than 2 seconds?

On this project, there were not many opportunities for crazy angles, etc. because we use a camera that is fairly standard for RPGs. The one place where we could be more creative with composing shots was in our mere illustrations that are peppered throughout the game. In those cases, we avoided conflicts by having the same person play both roles, storyboard art AND director... problem solved.

How did you cooperate with Monte Cook Games to find the particular Numenera art style and make it fit into Torment?

We frequently made our work-in-progress available to Monte Cook Games for review and feedback. From those exchanges we began to develop a visual vocabulary for what makes sense in the Ninth World. We were also constantly referencing several Monte Cook publications about the world of Numenera that helped to guide us about all aspects of the world of Numenera.

How has the team taken inspiration from real world cultures to develop the aesthetic of a world as conceptually far out as Numenera?

Developing a game based on Numenera was extremely freeing and enriching, considering the rules we were working with. The nature of humanity one billion years from now meant that we would be looking at some combination of elements from just about any ancient and modern culture you could think of from the world we know, and then using that as a launching place to imagine technologies and customs no one had ever seen before.
For one thing, we knew that it was important to depict humans as having evolved over the millennia to have fewer racially distinct features. We borrowed from a broad range of races and cultures to accomplish this. Alternatively, when it came to story or gameplay elements, we took the approach that anything that seemed too reminiscent of a culture or practice we'd heard of before would automatically pull us out of the ultra-futuristic tone of the Ninth World, so we made a special effort to avoid those familiar themes.
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Information about

Torment:ToN

SP/MP: Single-player
Setting: Technofantasy
Genre: RPG
Platform: PC
Release: Released


Details