The Merchant’s Alley
When starting the project, I knew I wanted to have some sort of guidance. Someone to check in on with. I got to know Kem Yaralioglu through the Experience Points Discord and asked him about some mentorship sessions, which, every now and then, helped to focus and reassured me that I was on the right path. I wanted to jump in right away, do my own thing, but Kem pointed out that having a visual goal in mind, and Wayfinder and Sea of Thieves both have the shape language I adore so much and play with colors in their textures, e.g., switching up hues, especially in the wood.
I studied the Wayfinder Art uploads from Jasmin Habezai-Fekri, Matêo Chilla, Bad Rhino Studios, Ranko Prozo, Alena Markelova, Jesse Carpenter, and Anton Shcherbakov to see how they treat the style, what texture is, what geo is, etc. Tabletop props were also high on my reference list, since there are many amazingly creative techniques for creating textures. Shapes tend to be very dramatic and exaggerated, while there are details in every corner.
I also researched a lot of envo projects on ArtStation and checked out people’s renderings of the components. This was highly interesting to me since these basically show the whole set of puzzle pieces that you need to make. Sometimes more, sometimes less. And the rest is assembly in Unreal. This helped to break down the gigantic task into something approachable.