Skylanders Swap Force
Elemental Zones
Just coming off of being the Art Lead on Skylanders Battlegrounds, I was asked to help out on Swap Force. Since I was coming on over halfway through the project, there wasn't an opportunity for me to take ownership of a map. However, I was giving ownership of the Elemental Zones - the key to toy sales in the Skylander's marketing strategies. Another artist had gone through and made a handful of textures and a few assets, so it was mostly my responsibility to take those assets and cater (sometimes alter) them into things that can be used to creating and staging the zones. I was able to create base lighting coats before the lighting artist came in and finalized it for ship. Finally, since the effects artists were slammed with their work, it was my job to create effects and destructibles to put the final touches to the zones.
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| Fire Zone |
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| Undead Zone |
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| Earth Zone |
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| Tech Zone |
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| Magic Zone |
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| Life Zone |
I was very fortunate in that we had a fixed camera placed by the designers. This afforded me the ability to cater every shot without worrying too much about what the player might accidentally see. However, in the following two shots, I was able to have explicit control over the game cameras. I set it up so that the camera had more of a "side-scrolling" orthographic view which was unique to the game.
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| Undead Zone |
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| Air Zone |
In some cases, it was required to have two elements represented with the same zone. In the below examples, we see this with the Fire/Water Zone and the Magic/Life Zone. This posed quite the challenge. There was no time to create unique assets so I had to pull from existing ones to cobble together zones that "made sense" with both elements.
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| Water/ Fire Zone |
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| Magic/ life Zon |
