Chapter 104 - Arthas’s Sketch (1/2)

Chapter 104: Chapter 103: Arthas’s Sketch

The planning of units and buildings only took two days with the help of the Memory Playback Potion. But of course, Chen Mo had just the numbers, with no images for reference at all.

Chen Mo had previously posted a few concept arts of the World of Azeroth, including gryphons and hippogryphs, but most of the units still lacked artwork.

As Chen Mo had so many other things on his hands, he decided to hand over the buildings and units to Qian Kun.

Qian Kun built a system according to the attack/defence types of the different units and buildings to achieve a sort of balance between different races and units.

Su Jinyu on the other hand was creating artwork for a portion of the units based on her concept art, and the rest of it were outsourced to an art company.

As for the story, Chen Mo only left the story for The Frozen Throne to Zheng Hongxi, asking to make a draft for the story (including the plot and campaign), before revising it in the future.

After assigning the jobs, Chen Mo started to work on the most important part, the foundations of the specifications for maps.

The Warcraft world editor (aka WE) was very powerful, leading to the development of many minigames.

Moreover this game birthed classic minigames such Chenghai 3C, Dynasty Warriors[1], and DotA. DotA was especially important as it started the long MOBA saga.

Blizzard didn’t know how powerful the world editor was, but Chen Mo did. Because of how useful it was, Chen Mo wanted to make sure he did it right, and even make it better than the one in his previous life.

Not only did the mainframe of the world editor needed to be good, other hero mechanisms(respawning, reviving, invulnerability, etc.) also had to be added, becoming part of the editor.

Moreover, the resources for the map were also very expansive.

The map settings included map size, terrain, texture, as well as water and land.

There were also settings such as time(night and day) which would affect the vision range as well as if they were sleeping. It could even influence the strategy for different races.

Night Elves for example, where a few of the heroes and units would get invisibility upon standing still during the night, as well as increased health regeneration and improved vision range.

Because of the limitations of the game engine, controls for Warcraft weren’t as crisp as Starcraft 2 or other MOBA games, and Chen Mo felt that it was a point he could improve on.

—

The development of the game continued steadily.

Chen Mo would spend most of his time making the engine for the world, and would spend the remaining time making sketches of different units, buildings or areas for Su Jinyu to finish and colour.

These sketches didn’t need to be as detailed as the cards as the players would mostly focus on the character models as opposed to the artwork.

As when the artworks were finished, there were still character models to work on, and after that were animations, collision boxes and many more items. This was why Chen Mo decided to focus on finishing the concept document, as it was a bottleneck for everything else.

First floor of the experience store.

“Goldfish, can you tell me what genre the game will be? Is it an RPG?” asked Wen Lingwei.

Su Jinyu replied, “Geez, relax, you’ll know when it comes out.”

“But the concept art is pretty good, the urge for me to help you colour them in are so strong I could barely contain myself,” replied Wen Lingwei.

Jia Peng also added, “It seems related to Azeroth, but it’s not a cute version this time. Perhaps it’s a more realistic I Am MT?”

Su Jinyu was speechless, “You guys are underestimating the manager, is he that type of guy? The type of guy to scam players for money on the basis of a reskin?”

Wen Lingwei facepalmed, “What do you think?”