Dev Diary #68 - The Art of The Silver Seas

Ahoy there sailors! I’m Elle, 2D Artist at Triumph. By now, some of our ocean adventures have already been told, but the art team has plenty more to share. Forget your sea sickness and set sail with us for The Art of the Silver Seas!

Image description: The Silver Seas key art

After the dark and grimy chaos-themed expansions of the last Expansion Pass, we wanted to start The Silver Seas in a much brighter mood, with the feel of tropical island exploration. Oceans now offer unique adventures and wonders, making them a destination rather than just a place you pass through.

Culture

To make oceans more enticing, we created a culture uniquely suited to settle them: the Mercantile, lovingly nicknamed the ‘Dutch culture’ during development. Their use of ports and ships make them excellent traders, funding an expensive taste in cloth and weaponry.

As we’ve done in the past, the culture concept exploration started with throwing our net wide, trying a wide variety of things and seeing what catches on:

Image description: Mercantile culture early concepts

Inspired by the Hanseatic League and 17th century Venetian merchants, this culture sports big fancy hats, puffy sleeves, frills, and feathers. We didn’t set out to create a water culture , rather we wanted this culture to be trade-focused with a connection to ocean themes. Thus we ditched the more on-the-nose ocean elements and instead took them as shape or material inspiration. For example; instead of a pauldron that is just straight up a shell, we use the shapes found in shells as inspiration:

Image description: Adding subtle water notes through shell inspired shapes

But I’m getting ahead of myself! Before we got to that final design, thumbnails were made for the full culture lineup based on these established ideas:

Image description: Mercantile culture lineup thumbnails (Barony subculture at the top, Cartel at the bottom)

And then polished up ( let’s pretend this step is as easy as it sounds! ):

Image description: Final Mercantile culture lineup (Barony subculture at the top, Cartel at the bottom)

Instead of a fully unique lineup for each subculture, we focus on making the two feel different with a select few unique models and strategic model variations where it truly matters. Happy with this lineup, our 3D artists got to sculpting:

Image description: Bravo and Silvershot unit sculpts

These culture lineup outfits are also split up into separate pieces so you can enjoy them as part of your ruler customization options, alongside unique ruler pieces like the seamare motif shield:

Image description: Cutlass & Shield Mercantile loadout

The horsegirl in me must also mention the culture horse armor, designed based on the same themes as the culture units:

Image description: Mercantile horse armour concept & sculpt

The Mercantile City architecture draws from the same Venetian-inspired visuals, featuring narrow streets alongside canals, bridges connecting districts, and strong ties to its ports. In early exploration we weren’t certain how the city visuals would work on water, so backup plans included spawning a tiny island underneath the city or having it built entirely on a harbor:

Image description: Early city concepts

After testing, we committed fully to a floating water city:

Image description: Final city concepts

Which yielded one of our most intricate world models and siege maps yet (appropriately pompous for this culture)!

Image description: Final city world model and siege map

Form

It wouldn’t be very Age of Wonders if you couldn’t explore the oceans as an aquatic form, so introducing—the Aqualon and Sharkkin:

The Aqualon are a fishfolk form, inspired by unused Syron form concepts (from Eldritch Realms) that you all seemed to love:

Image description: Unused Syron form concepts for Eldritch Realms

Our 3D artists did some sculpt exploration - initial concepts starting out more humanoid, but moved to the more alien, squidlike proportions of the 2D concepts by later removing the nose and enlarging the forehead. We were originally going to call these the “Squidkin”, but changed the name as we wanted more freedom to make options without tentacles.

Image description: Early Aqualon exploration

Happy with the base features, work began on the customization options. These fishies ended up with a huge range, allowing you to make anything from beautiful & tropical merwomen to slimy, scary sea squids:

Image description: Two aqualon rulers

For the complete mermaid fantasy, start your Aqualon faction off with the Children of the Waves society trait. This gives them the luscious Merfolk tail transformation right from the start of the game. Alternatively, apply this trait to your molekin faction for true ocean abominations … use your power responsibly!

Image description: Aqualon with Merfolk tail

The Sharkkin are designed to be the polar opposite: big, brutish, muscular. We felt the Orc proportions were underutilized lately, so this was absolutely an excuse to give those some love again. Early exploration was done in both 3D and 2D (and combining the two). We even experimented with human-shark hybrids, but we felt that (beyond this looking quite freaky) we wanted to lean more into the feral variants:

Image description: Early Sharkkin exploration

Without facial animations, we inject personality directly into sculpts, turning expressionless fish into expressive characters

Image description: Sculpt with and without expression

New forms don’t just mean new heads though—the entire body is sculpted to maximise the fantasy. Beyond killer abs, the Sharkkin body features gills, fins, and webbed hands.

Image description: Final base body sculpt

Their customization options (snouts, crests, skin deco, tail variations) offer up additional variety in the visuals of your sharkkin rulers. For the sharkiest of experiences, you can also choose to ditch your legs completely with the Merfolk transformation and get a unique full tail model!

The Shinier Seas

Once you’ve settled on how you’re starting the game, it’s time to discover all the shiny new content oceans now have on offer! Starting with a plethora of new structures—a magic material, an infestation, a dwelling (with three variations), two landmarks, and two ancient wonders!

Image description: GIF of The Silver Seas ocean structures

Each structure gets the full pipeline treatment: design, concept, modeling, texturing, animation, PFX, lore, icons, and illustrations. Bas covered the full list of structures in the World Map Content dev diary, so I'll just highlight my favorites, starting with the water-exclusive Gold Ancient Wonder: the Pearltide Dome!

The early design for this wonder used the name ‘Dried Sea Sphere’, and described a source of natural yet powerful water magic. In the concept phase we imagined this as a giant pearl ( resulting in the later name change ), shattered and exposing the magic core it once protected:

Image description: Pearltide Dome concept art for world map structure (left) and combat map (right)

New coral assets decorate this wonder and many of our new water maps (more on that in the Water Improvements dev diary):

Image description: Coral prop concepts

Image description: Coral prop models

And to further reinforce the idea that this pearl absorbs and attracts magic, we added flying fish orbiting the core as if trapped in its gravitational pull:

Image description: GIF of Pearltide Dome Fish FX

All of this combines into standout final visuals for both the world- and tactical combat maps:

Image description: Final Pearltide Dome world map structure (left) and combat map (right)

Another highlight is the Pirate Dwelling, featuring 3 personality variations: Bloodthirsty, Avaricious, or Heroic.

Image description: Dwelling concepts

Image description: Dwellings in-game

Sieging one of these Dwellings leads you to battle at their gate with another standout new water combat map:

Image description: Pirate Dwelling siege map

You’ll notice that this map also features a new tower unit, the Cannon Tower:

Image description: Cannon Tower concept & model

Its rotation allows it to have a very good aim:

Image description: GIF of Cannon Tower

Dwellings need pirate rulers too! We added fun pirate customizations to add to these rulers, including all of our favorite birds ;D

Image description: GIF of Pirate Hat options

We also added entirely new customization categories in the form of eye gear, hand replacements, and leg replacements.

Image description: New Eye, Hand, and Leg options

And don’t fret, we chose to release these specific customizations as part of the pantheon free update, so no expansion needed to enjoy your very own pirate rulers!

New Life Discovered

When deciding which wildlife units to make for any expansion, player encounter rate is always considered. What’s the point in making new content if you never encounter it? As much as we hope that you enjoy playing with water after this expansion and free update, we made sure to expand the water wildlife lineup with mainly creatures you can encounter both in the ocean as well as on land. Hence our new Wisps, Crabs, Flying Mantas and even the Seamare which has two model variations for this exact purpose!

Image description: Seamare sculpt - land and water versions

We also have wildlife that is naturally adapted to both land and water, such as the new crab units.

Image description: T2 Lightning Rune Crab concepts

Image description: T4 Storm Rune Crab concept & final model

A new rig allows fun animations, like floating sadly to the ocean floor on death:

Image description: GIF of Crab death animation in Maya

And we couldn’t help adding one water-exclusive unit: the T1 Frenzied Fish Swarm!! Try to resist the urge to pet these guys, I heard they eat fingers for breakfast…

Image description: Frenzied fish model

More Tomes to Research

Becoming a master of the seas may require learning new water magic. This expansion comes with 4 tomes you can pick, 2 subculture tomes, and 1 ‘kind-of’ tome whose contents are purchasable from the Pirate Dwelling:

Image description: Tomes of The Silver Seas

Luis covered the main tome mechanics in the first dev diary so I’ll just highlight the standout work from the art department, starting with two epic new racial units, the Swashbuckler and the Flowbinder Archer:

Image description: Swashbuckler & Flowbinder Archer concepts

Where racial units introduce some limits on how far we can push the outfits while still working for every form, seeing them on all the different forms always makes those limitations so worth it:

Image description: GIFs of Swashbuckler & Flowbinder archer outfits on different forms

The Swashbuckler got some unique animation setup for its’ Dust Disengage ability, which combines animation work in Maya with engine set up to control the curve of the throwback. This means that the unit was animated in place in Maya, and moved in distance in-engine.

Image description: GIF of Swashbuckler Dust Disengage ability

Non-racial units let us go even wilder, especially when we have the time to make brand-new rigs and animations like for the Ancient Hoarfrost Manta Unit. This means our concept artist can explore without any restrictions:

Image description: 2D concept exploration

Image description: 2D color exploration

The potential color possibilities were endless, but inspired by albino animals we ended up steering towards the frosty purples:

Image description: Final 2D concept (left) and 3D sculpt (right)

The manta idle animation turned out especially satisfying, making use of some really smooth motion curves:

Image description: GIF of Manta animation graphs shown in Maya

Besides the Manta, there is another standout unit in the ‘shiny new rig’ category: the Accursed Lamenter!

Image description: Accursed Lamenter in-game

This unit is inspired by sirens, mythological creatures that have taken many forms in popular media. Our siren permanently covers her face, hiding her monstrous features until you’re too close to escape:

Image description: Accursed Lamenter concepts

Image description: Accursed Lamenter sculpt

Creating her tentacle hair was a real technical challenge. Our rusty ol’ engine doesn’t have the capability to simulate real physics, instead a rig was created that offers the animators control of each individual strand, or multiple strands at once:

Image description: GIF of Accursed Lamenter Rig

These controls are then used to animate the hair:

Image description: GIF of Accursed Lamenter hair animation

And of course, when we make new rigs this means all of the units’ abilities need unique animations too, so don’t forget to slow down that combat speed now and then to admire them ;)

Image description: GIF of Manta Ice Blast ability

Image description: GIF of Accursed Lamenter Ghostfire Blast ability

Lest we forget, each of the new tomes also includes a Special Province Improvement:

Image description: The 4 new SPI’s

Concepts for our SPI’s are done directly on a screenshot of the world map. This top-down perspective is how they’ll always be seen, so it’s important they read well from that angle:

Image description: Concepts for the 4 new SPI’s

Additional detail concepts can be done when we need to clarify shapes for 3D artists, like these we did for the Pirate Haven (Tome of Piracy):

Image description: Pirate Haven additional concepts

Which gives our 3D artists more to go on so they can work their magic:

Image description: Pirate Haven 3D process from blockout to final

Sea Stories to Discover

In preparing for this expansion, we conducted player studies focused on water gameplay (more on that in the Water Improvements dev diary). One of the insights we uncovered was that players at best viewed water as passive geography and at worst as an unwelcoming space. To address this, the Water Happenings introduced in this expansion are mostly positive, introducing 20 reasons to set sail (referring to the 18 minor and 2 major happenings)!

Each of these happenings has a unique illustration:

Image description: Happening illustrations

These types of illustrations add a lot of player immersion, but can be very time-intensive to make. With so many to make we have to be efficient with how we make them, so we aimed for a sketchy style where we paint without any preliminary line drawing. This cut the time spent on these illustrations down to ‘only’ 80 hours, or 4 hours per illustration.

That process looks something like this:

Image description: Happening illustrations

The composition and colors are set up with large, textured brushes, immediately allowing us to judge if the image works as a whole. The rest is just polish, such as layering colors and pushing atmosphere!

And to differentiate these from the Cosmic Happenings (from Eldritch Realms), a new event UI was made using 6 new water-themed assets and some code animation magic:

Image description: Assets for the Oceanic Happening Event UI

Fully immersing you in the ocean experience:

Image description: Water Happening GIF

Misc

If after all of that art you aren’t already in a seafaring mood, the new UI skin will help you settle right in

Image description: The Silver Seas UI Skin

And uh... an icon or two were made!

Image description: The Silver Seas gameplay icons

Last but certainly not least, you can bet there’s a bug or blooper for every piece of art made. I leave you with the highlights:

Image description: The Silver Seas bloopers

Conclusion

And that is truly all folks. I find it necessary to finish off with a word of appreciation for your continued support of us and Age of Wonders 4. Beyond allowing all of us at Triumph to do what we love for a living, it is thanks to your support that we have been able to continue improving Age of Wonders 4 for so many years now.

Further proof of what your support allows us to do for the base game can be found in the next dev diary on Water Improvements, which also includes more art insights from yours truly ;D

If after that you are still craving more art, you can check out our Artstation art blast which will drop along with the release of The Silver Seas on November 3rd. Thanks for floating with me today, and we’ll sea you in the fin-tastic next dev diary! 𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 ⋆.˚ 𓇼

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