30 Hours of Hard Work : How one Hidden Object Scene Comes About
June’s Journey, our latest story-driven hidden object game, launched last October. Since then our team of artists has created more than 315 beautiful hidden object scenes. It’s probably no secret that a lot of work and love for detail goes into every single scene. In fact, about 30 work hours are needed to create one scene from an artistic point of view. Today we would like to give a sneak peak of how such a scene comes about.
We took the chance to ask Kateryna Isaieva, a Senior Artist on the June’s Journey team, how they actually do it.
Long before artists start drawing the scenes, our team of writers have finished the story. In June’s Journey, the player joins June on exciting adventures around the world to find out who killed her sister. “When starting to work on a new scene, we first identify the location, clues, gather references, and talk with the writing team to fully understand what the story entails,” says Kateryna.
“As a next step we create a concept, where we start adding details based on the written brief and additional requirements such as time of the day, mood of the scene, the location of the clues,” she adds.
For every scene there are 2 clues needed. “In this case I created the parlor of our main characters’ estate, where the story begins. The parlor is decorated with riding trophies, sailing memorabilia and a recent, prominent family portrait, which is our first clue. Looking around the room we noticed the picture laying down on the sofa, our second clue, which was taken at the place where June’s sister has been killed.”
The first concept then is sent to the writers for approval and to make sure it goes along with the story. Once the concept is approved, it is handed over to our art partners together with all necessary information for them to start polishing work.
As mentioned before every scene requires many hours of work in order to reach our desired level of polish and quality. This high level of quality, combined with our busy release schedule of one chapter per week, we closely collaborate with two outsourcing companies, who help us never miss our own deadlines.
The first step taken is to create a 3D blockout. This means building a 3D model based on the concept, adding color and textures, and applying the lighting to render the scene for the next production phase. Once approved, that 3D blockout it is taken to the final render stage, where textures and more details are added to give it the special atmosphere and “made with love” look we’re aiming for. To make sure that all 30 people from the team can reproduce what happened during the process, we archive all our communication and feedback with a team collaboration tool called basecamp.
Now that we have a final version of the general scene art, it’s time to turn it into an actual hidden object scene by placing items. “For every scene we plan 75 hidden objects, and our design team increases the difficulty curve more and more by adding items when replaying a scene,” explains Kateryna.
All these objects can only be placed in a previously defined area. Our players enjoy the game on all sorts of devices with large and small screens and we want the game to be fun for all of them. That way we can guarantee the same user experience no matter the device. After this step another feedback loop for object choice and placement happens and gets documented on basecamp.
Finally once all feedback is addressed and all items are integrated, the scene is done, approved and ready to be shipped to our players!
