The Art of Dragonspear

This is the first time Dragonspear Castle has ever been seen in a video game.

This article was originally published in Issue 2 of the Familiar. Siege of Dragonspear is now available on Google Play and the App Store

Today we’re publishing an interview with our creative team about Siege of Dragonspear: transforming a barren, 2D map into a living, breathing castle, the development of gnomish character Glint, and bringing a fan’s characters to life.

For a place with such a rich history, the structure of Dragonspear Castle has been very badly documented. Yet it’s hard to blame the scholars at Candlekeep for dropping the ball on this one. The job of plotting rooms and tunnels on a scale map isn’t made any easier by the bandit hordes rampaging through the castle or a portal to another plane that spits out devilish baatezu.

“I believe this is the first time Dragonspear Castle has ever been seen in a video game. Prior to this, there was one little top-down map of the castle, which we’ve used for inspiration,” says Trent Oster. “We also dug through all of the past of Dragonspear and all of the lore surrounding it, and the more we read, the more excited we got.”

As the scale of the project grew, from a small piece of DLC to a major video game expansion, so did the team working on it. Oster believes the Siege of Dragonspear crew created the largest amount of art for any Baldur’s Gate video game. “We originally started out with this idea that we’d only make a few areas. But the team kept going and going and the last total I heard was 76 all new areas, so we’re substantially larger than Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal,” he says proudly.

“Everything we do starts with the story,” adds Beamdog’s Art Coordinator Jonathan Hill, who says the original map from second edition D&D had to evolve to match the scope of the adventure. “The initial thought was that Dragonspear Castle would be a portal to the other levels inside the castle itself. Over the course of our development on Siege of Dragonspear, we realized that this would include a larger battle than has ever been done in any of the Infinity Engine games. We almost pull the camera back to reveal a greater area and have the castle be a backdrop to that battle.”

Prepping for such a big conflict forced the team to expand the castle’s areas to accommodate a lot more units on screen. The battle takes place in the courtyard and, as the game’s title suggests, includes the building of an army and a siege situation. “The great thing about Siege of Dragonspear in general is that no-one’s ever really seen a Baldur’s Gate game full screen. You normally only have that little bit of an area around you,” says Hill, although he’s keen to stress that the traditional Baldur’s Gate focus on discovery hasn’t been lost, with plenty of NPCs to interact with during that exploration.

“We’re going to an iconic location in Faerûn and it’s important that the player can walk around and reveal it. As the story started to evolve, we had to think, ‘where are we going to meet that NPC? How are we going to engage them?’ We needed to have enough space between each character so there was travel distance and everyone wasn’t all packed into one spot.”

World Building

In a breakdown of the development process, Hill reveals that everything begins with writers pitching an idea for an area of the castle. From there, a concept artist goes to work and fills in the details. This concept art is sometimes placed into the game as soon as it has been created, so the programmers can start to set up those scenarios.

“The 3D artists build what we refer to as a grey box model, which is just rough polygons. So, for instance, when the stone wall around the castle went in, it was just a flat wall and the castle itself was just a box. Once it’s in game, we have the chance to walk around and get an idea of the scale and we can start to refine the design from there,” Hill says.

“So if the hallways are too close together, we can spread them out or knock down a wall so that we can see more of the floor. Otherwise what ends up happening is we may have five or six party members going down a hallway and then getting into a crowded fight. The core idea is that the design has to support gameplay.”

Tweaking the design of the original 2D map to fit the video game wasn’t the only change that was needed. To truly live up to the name Dragonspear Castle, the location also needed an iconic piece of decoration to top it off (although the skeleton that straddles the building is from a red dragon which attacked the castle, not Daeros Dragonspear’s original steed). Yet even that design saw changes, as it moved from the initial concept art to the final in-game image.

“Because it’s a red dragon, it’s a D&D canon red dragon. Wizards of the Coast provided us with reference material and we had to make sure that the skull matched that, rather than being a generic fantasy dragon. In the initial sketch we didn’t quite have the horns right and now the skull is thinner and the horns are much longer. At that point we found ourselves getting into the forensic anthropology of dragons,” says Hill.

This is an ancient Red Dragon from the D&D Monster Manual.

Character Building

Video games are like any form of entertainment and an actor’s performance can have a major influence on how the audience responds to a character. For Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear that was true even when the audience was still restricted to the art team. The design for gnomish character Glint Gardnersonson underwent a major revision following some sterling work by voice actor Jacob Burgess.

The Name Of The Beasts

“I've been telling my five and six-year-old boys the story of Baldur's Gate as a bedtime story,” says fan Pontus Perstrand. “I've played the game so many times that I remember the beginning by heart. Of course there is a lot of fighting, which could get pretty repetitive, but I’ve reduced the number of battles to keep things interesting. That way they can focus on imagining what the monsters look like and what hardships the characters face during the fights.” On Reddit, Perstrand posted: “When I got home from work, my six-year-old son Assar showed me this.”

In honor of this piece of artistic inspiration, we had the idea of naming two monsters in Siege of Dragonspear Kämbälder and Gnäler. As you can see below, that’s just what happened!

Now Assar and Egon (the children of Perstrand) will find out their father has brought something to the Baldur’s Gate world!

Stay tuned, we’re excited to share more materials from the Familiar in upcoming weeks! Share your impressions on Facebook, Twitter, and in our forums and tell us about your favorite moments of Siege of Dragonspear.

Tom Rhodes: An Inside into the Artist's World

Beamdog Artist Tom Rhodes explains how his sketchpad reflects the seasons.

In 2016 we tried an experiment to bring the magic we saw in our community to a broader audience called the Familiar, a digital publication with industry interviews, fiction, contests, and Beamdog exclusives.

It’s a pity to let those articles vanish to time, so we’ve decided to share the materials from the Familiar on the Beamblog so more people can discover them. Today we publish an interview with Tom Rhodes.

This article was originally published in Issue 2 of the Familiar.

Tom Rhodes has developed an interesting new form of calendar. He loves to draw whenever he can and tends to switch between his two favorite subjects: fantasy and science fiction. The diary element comes into play by how he breaks those up.

“Usually in the winter I’ll be really into fantasy, and then in the summer I’ll get into sci-fi. So I can always tell what season it was when I look at my sketch books by what I was drawing—whether it was orcs or aliens,” he tells The Familiar.

That love of fantasy has always been a big part of his life—and his work—since he first read The Hobbit as a child. That led to an obsession with The Lord of the Rings artwork created by John Howe and Alan Lee, as he pored over their book cover and calendars.

“I would walk a few kilometers to the book store where they were selling the 1998/1999 Tolkien calendar, look at the pictures on the back, and then walk home,” he reminisces. “D&D is cool too, but I didn’t play it until I was in high school. It was Tolkien and those two artists that always kept me around fantasy, along with movies and videogames.”

Before moving to Beamdog, Rhodes worked as a concept artist at BioWare and taught illustration at the Edmonton Digital Arts College (EDAC).

Was the cover commissioned specially for this issue or is it already part of Siege of Dragonspear?

It was something I was working on in-house at Beamdog. It was a larger project overall and we thought it’d be perfect for the cover of The Familiar.

Are the two battling figures specific characters from Siege of Dragonspear?

They’re not any particular individuals but they are representatives of the factions from within the game. The guy with the boar spear is one of the crusaders and the guy with the two blades is a member of the Flaming Fists. They may not be named characters but the Flaming Fist character is based on the actual in-game sprite. I reverse engineered it from the tiny little guy, based on his armor.

What's your working process like?

I work digitally. Sometimes I sketch on paper first and then scan it, but this work was all digital. It always starts with a written description of what’s needed and any other aspects, like bits of lore or technical requirements like dimensions or color scheme. I then create thumbnail sketches to try and find out what the posing and composition is going to be like. From there I start putting in the color.

How long did the completed work take?

This image took about four days. Usually by the end of the first day you get a really solid idea of what it’s going to be like. On the second day it looks finished, but the rest of the time is spent making sure that it’s polished. The last 20% takes 80% of the time. Most of that time is spent on the rendering and making sure things are presentable. It’s taking the time to put extra careful brush strokes to make sure that surfaces aren’t too messy and that they also look like the material they’re supposed to be.

Is digital your favorite format or would you like to have the time to paint?

It’s a toss up between digital art and a ballpoint pen and a sketchpad. I recently got back into doing acrylic painting at home but I haven’t had too much time to work on that in the last few months. It’s relaxing, though.

Has digital been the norm since you started your career?

I had my first job in about 2005. But I started to get into digital art around 1997/1998. I was still quite young but I feel like a lot of things people think of as concept art, things like ArtStation and DeviantArt, I grew up alongside those. When I first started off, most concept art was still done with marker and paint, at least the stuff I was looking at.

What did you teach at EDAC?

I was teaching illustration and digital illustration and sequential art—so comics, graphic novels, Photoshop, painting. I was running students through the fundamentals of art as best as I could. Things like anatomy, perspective, composition, color theory—all the good stuff.

Based on the art we’ve seen online you love to draw. Is it something you do as an everyday thing even outside of work?

I like to draw on the bus, I like to draw on my lunchbreak. Even sometimes when I’m at Beamdog I’ll be working on a piece but then I’ll just have to draw something for myself. Just take a quick minute and doodle. It’s something I’ve always done. I guess it’s a good psychological break. Some people will go have a coffee, I’ll open up a new document and draw an orc head or something.

You helped create the comic Deep Soul. How did that differ to your work on video games?

That was with a writer named A.J. Lieberman, who works out of New York. He’s worked for DC and a bunch of comic companies on quite a few graphic novels over the years. One of his books, Term Life, is coming out as a movie this year. He was really good to work with, although that project took a year. I’ve not done a graphic novel before and that project made me think I might not do one again. [Laughs] But I’m working on another on the side here and there. It’s a fairy tale I’m writing and illustrating, which tries to figure out what would happen if a robot crash landed in a fairy tale kingdom.

You also run a weekly lottery on your Twitter feed to draw people’s D&D characters. How did that come about?

That’s actually really good fun. It came out of nowhere and gives me something to do, so now I have a hobby and I don’t just sit there reading Reddit all night. It’s also helping me get better and to build a portfolio—not that I need it, but it is nice to have a body of work. People also get to know me and my name gets out there a little bit. But my favorite part is giving people free art and I’m always pleased by how excited they get.

Five Years of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition!

Happy fifth birthday, BG:EE!

Today marks the 5-year anniversary of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition! It’s been a privilege for the whole Beamdog team to work on such an iconic title as Baldur’s Gate. 

A note from Beamdog CEO Trent Oster: 

“Five years of Enhanced Editions already. Wow, time certainly flies. We’re still patching the games and we’re still making them better. The Enhanced Editions of today are much evolved from our first release and we’re looking forward to the future. The 2.5 update is going to be a doozy and we’re really anxious to finish up the backlog and get it to our fans.”

A lot has happened since Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition first launched; over the last five years we’ve added new languages, fixes, features, an expansion pack and more. Updates started November 28, 2012 with v1.0.2012 adding roll total to the ability screen when creating a new character. Shortly after, the 1.0.2014 update introduced five new class kits (Dwarven Defender, Shadowdancer, Dragon Disciple, Dark Moon Monk and Sun Soul Monk). The Multiplayer Match-Making system appeared in v1.20.0. Then the 1.3.2053 patch implemented the Quickloot feature, while the 2.0 brought the Shaman class to BG:EE along with the new Cleric kit (Priest of Tyr) and a huge UI redesign. And, with the 2.5 patch just around the corner, the journey isn’t over yet!

And you know what? All these changes, all these fixes, all these neat new in-game tricks wouldn’t have been possible without YOU. Your support, bug reports, feedback, and your attention to details is outstanding. We’re lucky, as developers, to have such amazing and caring players as you.

In anticipation of this anniversary, we held a Fan Art Contest, and now it’s time to announce the winners! Before we start though, we have to say it really means a lot to see that the Beamdog community is so creative and that they’re willing to share that talent with us!

It was a very difficult to choose a favorite, but we’re proud to announce that Dynaheir, approximately four and a half seconds away from tossing a spell at Edwin's face, by Serabiet, is the Beamdog’s Choice Prize Winner.

Thou shalt not question my will once I present thy neck to the othlor! ~ Dynaheir

Serabiet will receive a special MYSTERY swag pack including a Digital Deluxe copy of our upcoming release, Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition! Congratulations!

We’ve also decided to reward Shaydh, Kirara and Buttercheese (who all tied as a close second for the Beamdog’s Choice. All three will receive a copy of NWN:EE, as testament to the quality of their submissions.

The Siege of Dragonspear Baeloth comic, by shaydh

As part of deciding Beamdog’s Choice, the team shared a few comments for the participants of the 2017 Infinity Engine Fan Art Contest: Enhanced Edition:

“I'm absolutely blown away by the talent of our fans, it's been making me smile every time to look at the thread. That people would put so much time and effort into making these submissions is inspiring, this kind of stuff is what makes game development worth it! (I can't wait to try making my own Bhaalin' Stuffed Avocado)” - Beamdog Designer, Alexei Pepers

“Wow, all of these submissions are amazing. Big thanks to all the people who submitted. There is such a talented group of fans around the Infinity Engine.” - Beamdog CTO, Scott Brooks

Magnificent Firkraag watching over his domain, by Kirara

“I love the variety! Pencil, colours, embossed leather, avocado--there is no medium untapped! Personal favorite: Annah about to carve a cutter.” - Beamdog QA Team Lead MarkR

“The "Minsc, Boo and Gram the Sword of Grief, by s0ulafein" made me giggle, Boo is so ferocious! :) Clearly going for the eyes.” - Beamdog QA

“My personal favourite was ‘Imoen and Haer'Dalis are ready to fight, by EmiDeClam’ - great piece!” - Beamdog Team Member

“Wonderful contest, I'm not very vocal in our community but it always makes me happy to see people engaging with fan art. Everyone who participated deserves a thumbs up!” - Beamdog Team Member

All Bad Things Must Come To An End, by Buttercheese

“A great collection of absolutely spectacular entries that make me proud to have worked in this world.” - Beamdog Team Member

Go for the eyes, Boo. GO FOR THE EYES! RrraaaAAGHGHH!

Minsc, Boo and Gram the Sword of Grief, by s0ulafein, is the winner of the Grand Prize (the Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear Collector’s Edition signed by the team, no less), chosen by forum members. The deciding votes for it arrived during the last twenty-four hours of the voting period, to make it 66 votes for the winner. Congratulations, s0ulafein!

You must gather the party before venturing forth.

A notebook leather cover, by CRUXPL, is the first of the three runners up, scoring 64 votes. It’s an amazing cover for a notebook if you’re planning a new adventure on the Sword Coast!

The Watcher’s Keep is beautiful in Autumn!

Seldar enhanced the in-game picture of Watcher’s Keep and added colors of Autumn to the area. This lovely result got him 50 votes!

What story will the Crumbling Chapel tell?

The Crumbling Chapel, Infinity Engine inspired area art, by SFisch, received 49 votes. According to SFisch, these games inspired him to learn how to Photoshop portraits, how to 3D model, how to make music, and have completely altered his life’s course (for the better, of course). We certainly feel the inspiration, SFisch.

Congratulations, CRUXPL, Seldar and SFisch, for winning 3 Runners-Up Prize Packages which will include their choice of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition / Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition / Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition physical copies, OR a digital version of Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition, OR a digital version of Siege of Dragonspear, OR their choice of an Enhanced Edition on mobile with all the DLCs.

We congratulate not only all the winners, but all the participants of the contest. Your fan art is a reminder of how important the legacy of Infinity Engine games is. Everyone who took part in the contest will get a special forum badge as a small token of gratitude from us in the weeks ahead.

What’s next for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and the other Infinity Engine games? Patch 2.5 for BG:EE, BGII:EE, and IWD:EE is coming soon! Watch out for more details here, on the forums, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch!

Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition Fan Art

“Don’t be afraid” by TariToons… Do not fear to share your art.

Planescape: Torment players around the world have been creating and sharing stunning fan art of the Planescape universe and memorable characters since the original’s release in 1999.

Inspired by Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition, fans from different countries have been creating unique interpretations of the Nameless One and his companions.We're excited to share with the world what our fans have sent to us.

Read the story of your soul.

We’ll start with this amazing poster for Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition by hiphopmummy.

The poster was one of the first pieces of PST:EE fan art sent to us shortly after our announcement of that game. It looks gorgeous and we love the Mike Mignola vibe!

Devils, demons... The Nameless One is ready for anything.

Alexander Biryukov, a 3D character artist from Saint Petersburg, says the protagonist of Planescape: Torment is probably one of the most interesting characters in the history of gaming and we agree! He does an amazing job to show the Nameless One going through the Lower Planes to seek redemption alongside his loyal companion, Morte.

Hey, chief. You okay?

The story of the Nameless One and Morte is definitely touching, and one of our favorite community cartoonists, TariToons, created this comic to express her feelings about Morte's backstory. Even the most treacherous misdeeds can be forgiven, no question.

“Awesome!” ~Chris Avellone

S0ulafein's has put pencil to paper to capture his take on one of his favorite Planescape: Torment characters, Dak’kon. The original githzerai concept is heavily based on eastern warriors, and this image greatly reflects on that heritage.

“Here's your high tech armor, Morte.” ~Nordom

We're pretty sure that Beamdog forum member Brus has visited the plane of Mechanus. How else could he have designed this battlesuit for Morte?

This is only a small part of Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition fan art out there. We love seeing all the amazing work our fans have made. If you’ve created fan art for one of our games, be sure to share it with us on Facebook, Twitter, and in our forums. We can't wait to see what else you all have to show!

The Familiar: Fans Give Concept Art New Life

In 2016, we were privileged to publish two issues of the Familiar, a digital magazine filled with unique behind-the-scenes material about the cRPG industry and Baldur's Gate games in particular. Since then, fans have been asking when they'll see issue three.

Dear adventurers, warriors, rogues, clerics, and mages, the Familiar has migrated to our blog as a special ongoing series of community spotlight entries. This will be the place to find great original community content about games you all love.

Julius Borisov

Beamdog Community Manager

For many players, the story of a character begins with the quest to find the perfect portrait.

Avid RPG fans will often spend hours and - in many cases - even days thinking about a future characters’ backstory, attributes, adventuring party, and relationships. All this must be summed up with a single piece of inspiring art to envision as the face of the hero throughout the coming adventure.