Hellgate: London Interview

Flagship Studios art director David Glenn answers several questions about his contributions to both Hellgate: London and the Diablo series over at Sumea.

Q: Well taking it back to Diablo, how did you design around the fact that all the areas would be randomised, except the towns, but all the actual dungeons would be randomised. How did you keep that interesting and work around those constraints?

A: Same situation we presented with Hellgate. We learned it first in Diablo. The original Diablo, was a far simpler looking. we only had 3 dungeons, tiles sets, looks, one town. And a lot of that was very code driven; the artists just built the tiles, and then they figured everything out in code. Where Diablo II, we upped the bar for detail in the world, and the more detail you add to a particular tile, the more obvious it will be if it gets repeated, so we had to come up with a balance between a good, rich visual look, and being able to recycle those assets a lot to make a large world.

Q: So would you say you would have larger tiles in Diablo II than you would have had in Diablo because they’re so detailed?

A: Yes, now technically the tiles were slightly bigger pixel wise, but we themed them together. So certain tiles had to go next to certain other tiles, so you’d have a section of wall, even as large as certain rooms were all pre-laid out, like the town for example. But we did that within the dungeons as well to create the special rooms, that would attach on to randomised hallways and doors and all that, and so we done that even further with Hellgate, where we take an entire building structure like Covent Garden Market, and create that. or St Pauls Cathedral, and make a near replica, so it looks familiar to someone who’s been to that certain place, or the British Meuseum, same sorta thing, but then put that into context, into randomised streets and levels and things preceding and following it.