Developer Diary | Art & Achievements

I’m CreamGene and I hope you have had a good time reading previous Diaries and are as excited as we are for the release.

Since I’m here, I would like to share with you some of the art we on HOI have loved to see the most as well as show off some behind-the-scenes… or WIPs of how some of the features took shape and came to be… as well as a passion project from me that I’m very excited to finally unleash!

Features

From my point of view, the features took some time to nail down and feel right, and I think it's very important to invest time and effort in that.

Here I’ll showcase some of the steps and directions that the Special Projects and Raids went through. I believe that you have already gotten some nice run-throughs from earlier DDs so if you want to refresh your memory, please head to the earlier DDs where our fantastic Content Designers explain the ‘hows and whys’ since I’ll mainly showcase the art journey for them.

Special Projects

Let me tell you that I already had the vision here and I’m so happy that it came through! Since we wanted to introduce scientists and all the things they can do I wanted to make it look and feel like stationary! Paper and folders, ink and coffee stains to really tie this together. I started to change the font as well to match better and I’m so happy that it could stay in.

Mock-ups of how the windows could look

Fixing the Scientists and the List to hire scientists WIP!

Window coming together (WIP)

The project windows starting to look alright. Still, some tweaking left to do.

Adding colour-coded ribbons in the research tech tree to better tie the techs together.

Current In-Game look for Special Projects

Raids

This was interesting because we really wanted to make this one feel right, and also stand out as its own thing. You primarily play from the map but the icons shouldn’t look like any generic icons but still not steal too much attention, yet be visible enough for you to interact with. Also, the window should feel linked to this as well. There was a bunch of trial and error and a lot of playtesting involved but in the end, I think we managed to get some really nice-looking art for you to go along with a cool feature!

The launch window. From concept (and this is just the most recent concept, there would be too much to share if I showed the whole iteration process) to in-game.

The outcome window. Again, from concept and prototype to how it looks in-game.

The on-map icons, from concept (again, so many iterations) to how they look in-game!

And some fancy iconography that shows how the landmarks look in the province view.

Current In-Game look for Raids

Focuses

You know the drill! Here are some of our favourite Focus icons for this DLC.

German Focus Icons

Austrian Focus Icons

Hungarian Focus Icons

Belgium/Congo Focus Icons

Portraits

And of course some of our favourite Portraits as well!

German Portraits

Austrian Portraits

Hungarian Portraits

Belgium/Congo Portraits