Programmer Art vs Empty Pockets: The Conundrum

Three years ago, Florian and I quit our jobs and put our savings into making the turn-based RPG we always wanted: deep and challenging like the games we grew up with, but ruthlessly condensed.

The whole experience in under two hours. Baldur's Gate 2 meets a lunch break.

When you’re funding yourself, romance only gets you so far. We had a coherent 3D style, but our 2D still looked like programmer art. We needed help.

Almost two years ago, we found Anca Beldie, a super talented 2D artist who immediately got what we were going for. Together we built out the heroes, and honestly? We were proud of them. These were the designs we planned to ship with. You can still see them in our old Steam trailers.

A New Chapter with Numskull

In September last year, we signed a publishing deal with Numskull. They saw potential to push the character art into something more dynamic and visually striking, and offered the budget to do it. We've always loved the character illustrations from Diablo, so we knew exactly where we wanted to take it.

We went back to Anca. She had already shaped these characters once, and they had grown on her just as much as they had on us. Over the next three months, she reworked the original designs to fit the new style.

At the same time, our friend Adrian Baragan joined on the 3D side, remodeling the faces and hair of all 12 characters to better match the 2D art.

A Character Sheet Come to Life

We wanted to capture a very specific feeling: sitting down at a D&D session with a beautifully illustrated character sheet in front of you. The portrait is vivid, detailed, almost larger than life, while the in-game representation leaves room for your imagination to fill in the gaps.

Next time, we'll share more about how Valor of Man came to be.

Thank you for reading! See you in the next blogpost.

- Traian & Florian