Deep Dive: The innovative projected 2D workflow of Songs of Glimmerwick

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as the memory-altering mechanics of adventure game RE:CALL, the appeal of distorting the nostalgic and familiar for the sake of terrifying your audience with Choo Choo Charles developer Gavin Eisenbeisz, and teaching the player to find the beat through environmental cues in Melatonin.

In this edition, Danny Weinbaum of Eastshade Studios walks us through how the 2D art of Songs of Glimmerwick was informed by a 3D art pipeline and what that looked like in practice.

I’m Danny Weinbaum, founder of Eastshade Studios, and technical director (among other things) of Songs of Glimmerwick, a story-driven witch academy RPG where magic is cast through music.

Songs of Glimmerwick is a huge visual departure from our previous title Eastshade, and kind of an oddball in its rendering style and art pipeline. The game looks like one massive illustration of creative director and lead artist Jaclyn Ciezadlo’s (at least that’s the goal!), but the world borrows a lot of methods from 3D art in how it’s constructed. It took over a year of trial and error before we came to this mix of workflows, but what we’ve settled on offers us a really nice mix of benefits from the 3D way of doing things, while maintaining the artisanal magic of Jaclyn’s illustrations. It also happens to yield a unique look and feel to the game.

Most "props" in the world are individual illustrations from Jaclyn (I suppose they could be called sprites), mapped onto planes or single "quads." Our