[Dev Diary #30] The Faces of History: Leaders in Gilded Destiny

Salutations industrialists!

I'm Marc, a Producer on Gilded Destiny. In today's dev diary, we're going to update you on the progress we've been making with Leaders, focusing on art style, animations, modding, and the importance of Leaders in the game. We also have a video version of this Dev Diary, which includes detailed examples of our portraits, animations, and implementation workflow.

If you haven’t already, please wishlist Gilded Destiny on Steam, subscribe on YouTube. You can additionally join our Discord, or Reddit community to stay up to date.

For more information about the Leader System itself, be sure to check out our previous Dev Diary on Leaders from last year, where we discussed the Leader UI, Leader traits, positions, and skills, and general mechanics of the Leader system.

In Gilded Destiny, Leaders represent the famous men and women of the nineteenth century who feature in our game as recruitable characters, that can fill governmental, military, and researcher roles. The game is also able to autogenerate generic Leaders who can be used to supplement (or even replace) the unique, historical Leaders, in order to cover both historical and alt-historical scenarios.

Without further ado, let's dive in.

Creating Portraits

Given the number of countries and the overall time-span of the game, Gilded Destiny will have a significant number of historical Leaders. We've therefore had to be somewhat selective about which Leaders get unique portraits, and which get generic portraits that are just representative of their class and nationality. This means that we can still include plenty of Leaders with the appropriate traits and stats, but without being too constrained by the number of unique portraits we can reasonably produce (while still making sure that some famous faces are making an appearance).

Leader portraits use a realist painterly style that allows us to represent a wide range of historical personas with a fitting degree of detail and personality. We collaborate closely with an outsourcing studio, which allows us to scale the production of portraits while still maintaining a high level of artistic quality and historical authenticity.

We aim to preserve some degree of personal and cultural variation as well, within a manageable scope. While most 19th century military uniforms of the era tended to imitate the French style, we include some variations, such as red coats for British generals and white coats for Austrians. We also include some special clothing, such as the yellow dragon robes of the Qing Emperors.

Summary:

• Historical Leaders will be given unique portraits where possible, although some will have generic portraits so that we can include a much wider range of real people.

• Leader portraits use a painterly style that mimics nineteenth-century portraiture.

• Leaders will have some degree of personal and cultural variation in their uniforms and clothing.

Leader Animations

After a portrait is finalized, polished, and approved by our artists and designers, we move to the animation phase. The portrait is separated into core components: head, clothing, body, and background. Each piece is exported as a high-quality PNG for animation using Spine (our rigging tool), in which our artists create meshes and skeletal rigs. Then we animate subtle, natural movements, such as breathing or posture shifting, to evoke a sitting-for-a-portrait feel.

We'd like to think that if animated portraits existed in the nineteenth century, this is how they would have looked.

Currently, animations are randomly selected from a pool of eight animation clips, creating an ongoing loop of non-repetitive motion that the Spine Unity plug-in blends automatically. This setup creates