Developer Diary | Art & Achievements!

I once again get an opportunity to talk about what happens on the Art Front during a HOI4 production and I’m excited to share with you some of the things that have been in the works. Both challenging tasks as well as funny ones, of course.

I know I usually showcase the how-to when I do loading screens when I get these opportunities, but I think you can find the two latest descriptions from earlier Dev Diarys to be adequate if you need to know the “how-to-think”. But I’ll show some small step-by-step just because I can.

Loading screen It started with our Game Designer Bradley, or as you know him as well, Corax, who already had a vision for what he wanted. He wanted two different ones. One of the Finnish Winter War, with Finnish soldiers watching Soviet troops, make their way through the frozen marshlands. And one with the sinking of the Blücher. And I got to choose which one to do.

Of course, I chose explosions because I hate myself that's pretty cool. I drew explosions before, but never like this so I thought it could be a nice challenge… if I could pull it off.

I was provided with reference images of the ship and the place as well as a video clip of the event from the movie The King's Choice. Even if it’s a reenacting of the sinking of Blücher it still is a pretty cool scene to draw inspiration from. So let's speedrun this demonstration!

3D elements put together! Renders made by our 3D artist @Slurpen_Paradox (because if I can avoid hard surfaces, I will).

Here, the paint-over progress has started. …… trust the process.

After a loop of feedback and paint-overs, it finally starts to look like something more interesting than just a dark blob where it started. Just some more tweaking and adding texture as well as some action and it’ll be done.

And here we are! I hope you’ll enjoy the new loading screen for Arms Against Tyranny!

Here is also the winter-themed one (tho I can’t take credit for it) made for AAT. [Art made by @the_real_timor]

The Joint Focus Tree

We also wanted to do something new for a Joint Focus Tree when the discussion of a joint Nordics was a must. So now the idea phase starts. How different should it look? How much of different shapes will still make you think “Focus Tree”? Will it look good together as a tree? How do we best portray the different ideologies for each outcome?

So now some thumbnailing of ideas happens as well as the thought “Is just the naming bar enough to change?” The answer is ‘no’. Of course, we wanted to go full out when we had this new idea.

So when we realize that we want to make the actual focus icons mirror the ideologies we have a new question “What would a joint focus tree even look like? What would have to change to make it stand out?” So I started to make up the shape language for what each ideology would feel like. It ended with a bunch of experiments that you saw @carloPDX showcase in the Joint Focus icon Dev Diary

Yeah… I didn't feel anything out of these.

We landed on these