Underground cavern design progress, Goblin Taskmaster mini boss development

Taskmaster mini boss head sketches

Taskmaster Gaz'lan wip

Here is the start of my first dungeon boss designs, for the previously posted geothermal power plant themed dungeon.

To start the designs off I decided that I would design the head of the character first, as I have found previously that an interestingly designed head can make designing the rest of the character easier.For this boss I have gone with the idea of a taskmaster of slaves - who will be the trash mobs I design later, this boss would be a mini-boss that you would fight on the way to the main dungeon boss.

When looking at the designs for previous Goblin bosses and named enemy npcs in warcraft they always tend to be designed with machinery enhancements to make them seem more of a threat. With this in mind I started sketching some kind of gun like weapon that attaches the Goblins right arm, with a whip in the other to link to the task master job he fulfils.

I am think about the types of attacks, and abilities he would use against players whilst designing which helps flesh out the design. For instance the whip being use to stun a random player, and the gun being used for a rapid fire attack of some sort, and the deadly one hit attacks that many bosses have in the game.

At the moment I just have the bust of the character as the initial sketch I did of the character had his legs posed in a way that didnt quite work. Once I have finished designing and have rendered this character I am planning to design two trash mobs that a player would fight in the dungeon and then move on to a final boss design for the dungeon.

I have also done some more work on the underground section of the power plant that would act as a second dungeon. I hope to flesh this out further after I have done the designs mentioned above.

Underground cavern dungeon designs and the entrance to the dungeon

Value/lighting rough

Edit: Here is is a quick rough of the basic 3/4 lighting I am planning to do and I have also given him legs now.

First Dungeon cut out, and initial wip of second dungeon

Dungeon thumbnails

The image are the thumbnail designs for my first dungeon. I knew from the beggining that I wanted to have some kind of Goblin factory.

In second image are the cut out designs I did for my first dungeon idea, which is meant to be a Goblin geothermal power plant of some sort which would be found in the volcanic zone I posted previously. The first cut out is the main room, the second cut out is the first room you would see when going into to the dungeon, and the third is the right wing of the dungeon. I built all of these as very quick 3D models in order to find an interesting but clear angle to show the design of the dungeon.

My goal with the dungeon design was to allow for lots of different areas to explore and to make them as non-linear as possible whilst avoiding 'dead ends' which require the players to go back to another area after clearing one. I feel this leads to a more interesting flow in terms of the level design and makes the concept drawings more interesting to draw as a result.

Whilst I was doing a quick map for this area I started adding a collapsed area to the dungeon which lead to an underground cavern filled with other creatures and bosses. I thought it would be interesting if this would be my second dungeon and you can see the initial sketches for these above.

For the initial dungeon designs I have designed the dungeon first, and then I am planing to the design the bosses and creatures etc that inhabit it. I actually think this was a mistake to do as I feel the dungeons would have evolved into more interesting areas if I had based them around the a few characters i,e the bosses for that dungeon. I think I will do this for my third dungeon and then compare my thoughts on the two in my final report on the two methods and their results as part of my final report.

My undeground cavern designs I did as more of a traditional concept piece like my previous environment shots, and then I tried mixing the cutout look in the 3rd picture which is intended to depict the entrance to this new instanced off dungeon. I feel this is a much more artistically pleasing to look at, but perhaps it isnt as practical for designers to build from as alot of information is left up to the imagination and as such is better for inspiring further designs than to be used as the final blueprint design for the dungeon.

I believe for this project I should be focusing on the initial stages of preproduction where the concept artist is brought into inspire further designs, so the cut-out look I have gone for above probably would have been okay for a later stage of development but not for the preproduction stage I should be concentrating on at this point in the development cycle.

Development for the final sets of zone environment concepts

Frozen Environment

Recently submerged environment

Goblin Coastal environment thumbs

Goblin Coastal environment

Volcanic valley thumbs

Volcanic environment

Here are the last of the environment concepts for my final project. At this point I think going forward I will further develop my concepts around the volcanic environment, Goblin coastal environment, and the first environment I did of the country vale.

I will go back and clean up all of these environments later on in the project, for now I feel I need to move on to the dungeon designs and related concepts and that these are at the stage where enough information is present to build upon.