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Stoic recently updated its website with new information about the company's upcoming strategy role playing adventure game, The Banner Saga. The update includes a new art blog on the design of characters for the game as well as a five part lore section now available on the game's site.

The Sketch

We start every character (Re: class) with a sketch phase where we try out different looks and styles. What's this classes job in combat? Are they heavily armored or are they a damage dealer? Since we've set the Banner Saga in a low fantasy setting it's important to us to make a viking look like a viking, not some random fantasy barbarian with huge shoulder pads and spikes and...whatever. Keeping every class looking like they could exist in a real world is the major motivating factor behind each design. Here's the final sketch of the Axeman, which eventually became the Backbiter, one of the upgraded, or promoted versions of the base Axeman.

The Combat

The next step is to take the sketch we've got and design it to be used in-game on the combat board. Even though the combat design is, in this case, different than the sketch you can see the similarities and the reason for doing a sketch phase previous to this. You may wonder why we didn't do a larger, more detailed phase before this, but the way a class appears in combat is of the utmost importance to us. I've kept the details in his design simple, not just to help time estimates during the hand animated process, but also because I believe this is in keeping with what I see in the older animated movies. I favor burly beards and macho mustaches on my vikings so I went that route for this guy. Since we're using an animated style it's important for us to use colors that aren't garish, but rather a bit desaturated to go with our real world approach. We throw the concept onto our game board and see what he looks like in context with all the other classes. It's very cool and rewarding for us to see all the classes in our game on some big combat board all sized correctly and posed next to each other to see how they interact with each other visually.

The Banner Saga: Character Art Design

The Banner Saga: Lore Section

The Banner Saga (add to watch list)

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