Hello, I’m Adrien Cantone, Art Director for Trailblazers: Into the March, and this is my first devlog for the game! Today, I’m going to talk about how we created the assets used to generate the thousands of crew members you’ll be taking care of in the game! Before that, a few words about myself for those who might be interested.
I’m a French artist in my twenties who studied illustration and comic books. I quickly realized that comics weren’t my dream job and that I preferred video games and animation. Back then, there weren’t many schools in France for this, so I taught myself using online resources from artists such as Alexandre Diboine, Marco Bucci, Gop Gap, Tim McBurnie, and many more!
So if this is a career you want to pursue, there’s no need to pay for expensive schooling—you can find everything you need online! My first jobs were with animation studios such as Amopix and Sony Pictures Animation. Then, after a few freelance gigs as a concept artist for video games, I ended up at Strangers!
During the job interview with them, I had very little information about the game, but I was already inspired by the concept. I came in with a vision for the graphic style I wanted to bring to Trailblazers. I had just discovered the amazing work of Calum Alexander Watt and showed it to the Strangers team as one of my inspirations. They loved the direction! Over time, we added many more references and inspirations to the moodboard, and if I had to summarize them, it would look something like the image below.
For this first devlog, I think it would be interesting to talk about the procedural generation of portraits. In Trailblazers, you can recruit randomly generated crew members at the Hub. You can see their portraits, but you’ll also see them on the ship in a simplified look we call “Pawns”! Creating the art for Trailblazers presented me with numerous challenges. As an artist, this is by far the most complex project I’ve ever worked on, for a few reasons:
The top-down camera view (it’s hard to make things both readable and visually appealing from above).
The need to generate thousands of unique crew members.
The fact that we’re a small indie team (I’m the only full-time artist on the project!).
I’ll show you the workflow we used to create the crew members despite these constraints!
Pawns are the main way characters are represented. This is how crew members appear on the ship and on excursions. It’s a simplified, almost abstract view that still gives the player an understanding of their movements and designs, even at a distance or awkward camera angles.
To create all the assets efficiently, I took inspiration from Lego and divided the assets like this >>
The advantages of this approach:
All characters can share the same animations for arms and legs regardless of body shape.
Not all animations need to be hand-made—the head can be programmed in Unity to turn towards objects, making characters more expressive.
Characters can easily equip objects and share the same gear, enhancing customization and player attachment.
Specificity: most assets—like face, hair, arms, and legs—exist in horizontal versions for when the character sleeps, faints, or dies. (It’s a lot of work!)
It’s not in the game yet, but I dream of characters evolving physically over time based on what they experience—like losing a limb or gaining weight.
Including animation frames, we currently have 540 assets for the pawns, and we’ll have even more as we add gear and tools.
A face is the first element through which a player connects emotionally to a character. That’s why pawns aren’t the only visual representation of your crew. We built a portrait generator that uses just a few layers to create thousands of expressive, semi-realistic faces.
It’s made of 13 layers, in this order:
1
Hair Underlay
2
Face
3
Wrinkles
4
Earrings
5
Face Paintings
6
Cyber Modifications
7
Mouth
8
Nose
9
Eyes
10
Eyebrows
11
Suits
12
Beard
13
Hair Overlay
14
Equipment
Example of how the layers assemble to create a face
We currently have 500 hand drawn assets in this portrait generator. These portraits play a very important role in making each character generated by the game unique and i hope it will increase the emotional connection between the player and their crew members.
As you can see, a cat has sneaked into the portraits: your crew won’t be limited to humans. Animal and robotic companions can join your adventures too. They perform simple but useful tasks—cats chase rats that steal food, while robots carry heavy resources. Their portraits and pawns are simpler than humans’, with only color variations within each type.
One of our next task is to to adjust the parameters of our portraits generator to visually showcase the different factions in the game. Here is an early test of that with the Scavengers faction ! Only they will be able to have that equipment and tattoos on their portraits.
I hope you liked this first Art devlog, please let me know if there is a specific topic you want to learn more about next time ! Bye !
Adrien