Dev Blog #7: Photography for Faesholt

Howdy!

Dan again. On top of the technical mumbo-jumbo I generally do, my day-job as a photographer/extreme sports bum tends to leak over into Althas. Since I get around a lot I tend to collect a great many “scrap” photos, however, these make perfect reference photos for the artists, which leads neatly onto today’s blog post.

Today I’m going to show off a few reference shots we are using for developing the landscape around Thenodar. The main inspiration for Thenodar is northern Europe, and specifically northern England and Scotland for Bordrima.

The following four shots are being used for developing Faesholt, the forest we recently released a few in-game screenshots of.

Faesholt01

— Rusland Moss, Lake District, England

Near to my spawning ground, I of course had to squeeze in a shot of this area somewhere. Luckily there are some nicely mossy (no prizes for guessing where the forest’s name came from) and wizened trees in these parts, giving a pleasant Tolkienesque feel to the woods.

 

Faesholt02 Faesholt03

— Strathyre, Scotland

Both shots above are taken in central Scotland, most of the forest around there has a very “raw”  feel to it. None of this new-fangled plantation nonsense.

The former photo has generated a lot of ideas for the river gorge areas on the north side of Faesholt. The latter shot gives a general idea of what we are aiming for the transition to surrounding low-lands and foot-hills to be.

 

Faesholt04

— Le Giffre, Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval, French Alps

Cheekily this river isn’t exactly somewhere you would call “Northern Europe”, however it looks about right. Bite me.  Geologically speaking,

its reasonably similar: rocky, shallow and mainly carrying melt-water.

That’s about it for this week, though there are plenty more where these came from, as my long-suffering hard-drive will vouch for.

Till next time,

Stay knarly.