Where do we go from here?

I was assigned as the project art director to a very small team beginning development on the next Civilization title. Civilization IV was already our best selling title to date, and the studio wondered what we were going to do to make a worthy sequel. Many of the big game play concepts we decided on early, including the move to a hexes and the limit of one unit-per tile. One of the first changes we made was to modify the Civilization IV engine to support armies of little warriors. With that change alone war went from being a stack of units to massive battle lines of hundred.

Epic historical fiction became the tag line to establish a clear visual direction, and we needed to explore that concepts in all aspects of the game. I put together a bunch of old artwork to imagine how cities could look to emulate cities in history.

The largest visual component of a Civilization title is the terrain. It is the backdrop on which the game is experienced. Not only does it establish the scale and scope of the world, but it is also the dominant source of the game’s color palette. We wanted to add the the variety that players experienced when exploring the game world, and with that in mind I worked with concept artist Erik Ehoff to establish these regional color studies.

We also wanted to push the variety of the Civilizations in the game. The goal was to create each leader’s ideal environment in which you would engage with them during diplomatic negotiations. Marc Hudgin’s leader thumbnails became the basis for the larger concepts and the eventual 3D scenes developed for the game.