Age of Wonders 4 - Dev Diary #32

Couchpotato spotted the dev diary #32 for Age of Wonder 4:

Dev Diary #32: The Art of Eldritch Realms

Sovereign greetings my Thrall kin, Art Director Rich Burgess here for another image-heavy thread of tentacles. Be warned of minor visual spoilers, don’t tread further if you want to go into the Abyss fresh!

For this Dev Diary I’d like to discuss the process of pulling this DLC out of the darkness of the Umbral Abyss and into the light. With some behind-the-scenes exploration and some technical processes.

Your Eldritch Sovereign Leader

I can't think of any games where you can customize your own monstrous Eldritch leader, so we had a lot of fun exploring what this could mean and look like. To start and hit the ground running we took the existing Lost Mage unit as a base and built on top of it.

Making sure the unit always floats and doesn't hold any weapons (albeit a Relic hovering in front) meant we were freed from many animation restraints and could really push the silhouettes and bodies of the leaders.

Tentacles are cool, but what other variations could we push? Folded moth wings instead of arms, a mermaid or sinew body, and insectoid legs, we tried to fulfill different eldritch fantasies. We started off with blue sky sketches exploring possibilities:

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