Hello everyone and welcome to devlog #3.
It’s been a few months since our last devlog but our efforts to bring the beloved Volfyirion into the digital world have not stopped.
Hi, I’m Sinasio, lead developer of Volfyirion Digital Game, and I’m here to tell you what we’ve been up to in the past few months.
We focused mainly on two aspects:
- Visual Style of the game
- AI
In this post we will explore the first point in detail.
The concept
One of the things that distinguish and that we like most about the Volfyirion card game is its amazing artworks.
We’re deeply in love with the styles, the mood and the feeling that they transmit to the players and we knew we wanted our digital players to have this experience as well.
But first, let’s begin with a screenshot of the game at the beginning of summer 2021.
Pretty ugly right? Well, before judging (
) note that this prototype with just a few environmental 3D elements, no lighting and 2D UI elements, was really useful to implement all the game logic and start drafting the UX indeed.
Moving to 3D
We ‘ve always been fans and players of 3D card games. We invested a lot of hours playing titles such as Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra.
It is natural that we wanted Volfyirion Digital Game to be set in a deep, pleasant and appealing 3D world, carved from the lore and the artworks our artists created.
Our work started from the cities, as you can read in the devlog #2 and has been extended in the past months to all the elements of the game.
Once cities were ready (thanks to our @Soas) we integrated them along with a first 3D version of the cards.
Later on, the market and the Volfyirion’s lair came, which you can see on the left.
Setting the mood
At this point the scene was ready, all the main parts were ported to 3D and placed in the correct position. It was time to start working on the lighting and the elements of the environment to better define the mood of the scene.
As usual, our 3D artist @Soas , put up a concept render in Blender (did I mentioned that we really love Blender? )
Now this is starting to look right, isn’t it? So we were pretty excited about it and we began to put the scene together in Unity.
At first, we updated the ground material, fixed the global illumination, added some lights on the four platforms at corners and a blue-ish effect on the left and right side, to help players focusing at the center.
Then, we added the trees to the environment and god rays, cause they’re cool
And that is how the game looks today!
We tweaked lights using some post processing effects and added a couple more lights to improve shadows of cards, which make them look really into the scene.
For the blue buttons on the right side, we didn’t really like them being too detached from the environment, so they have been redesigned to look more natural. There’s still room for improvements but the mesh should be final.
What’s next
We’re all quite happy with the final visual style! I know there is still a lot of work to do in many areas of the game.
One of the things I’m focusing on is studying and adding VFX to cards and cities which would make the gameplay experience more rewarding. For now we used a lot of placeholder assets just to give an idea of what we want to achieve and hope to show you more about that in the future.
We’re also still working on the style of cards. As you can see from the screenshot we sort of moved away from the layout of the physical cards for spacing reasons, but I’m not really convinced we got it right. More on this topic soon 
Final
That was a long journey! Thanks for reading all the way through
Next posts will be about the cards, the music, the AI system and hopefully we will also show you a preview of how Volfyirion the Dragon will look in the game.
Stay tuned