Legend of Grimrock: Making of Intro Sequence

The folks at Almost Human have put online a blog post that describes some of the “tricks” used to make the images contained in the introductory sequence of the game. A lot of this obviously relies on images, but I’m going to quote the first paragraphs:

Legend of Grimrock has a storyline running under its hood and to help it get it moving we needed an intro sequence in the beginning of the game. Naturally some fancy big money cinematic was out of the question, so we had to come up with some more down to earth type of solution. Pretty quickly we narrowed our options to still images with overlaid text. That was relatively easy and fast to do, but allowed more freedom for the player to watch the images and read the texts in his/her own pace. Intro sequences’ main purpose was to set the mood and setting for the game with the help of iconic tune by Stakula (which we talked earlier in here).

In this post I’ll show some tricks of trade on how the intro images were created. The images were mostly made with the same techniques that are used in movies to create so called matte paintings. They are a combination of photo manipulation, painting and rendered 3d objects. I used mostly my own photo library of various things I’ve photographed during trips and vacations over the years. Majority of the mountains are from Lapland and north Norway I visited couple years ago with my wife. We had to stop the car all the time when I saw something cool I wanted to take a photo of.