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.

The Making of Siege of Dragonspear

This article by Daniel Griliopoulos was originally published as part of Issue 2 of The Familiar. We're republishing the article now that phone and tablet players can experience the exciting story of Siege of Dragonspear. Siege of Dragonspear is now available on Google Play and the App Store.

Siege of Dragonspear started as a concept more than six years ago, when Trent Oster began acquiring the rights to Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, with the first programmers starting work on the project from April 28, 2011. “It was actually straightforward to get permission for more Baldur's Gate content once we had cleared up all the legal issues around the Enhanced Editions,” remembers Phillip Daigle, Siege of Dragonspear Producer and Lead Writer. “The fine folks at Wizards of the Coast were very enthusiastic about the idea once they saw how invested we were in Baldur's Gate and the Forgotten Realms.”

Having brought two Baldur’s Gate video games to modern audiences, Beamdog in 2016 turned its attention to an all-new tale that sits between the iconic titles.

Despite Beamdog’s enthusiasm for new Baldur’s Gate content, the team didn’t immediately start work on the project. “We began discussing Dragonspear in late 2011, although at the time we were still calling it ‘ BG1.5’,” says Daigle. “Our initial idea was for an expansion that bridged the gap between the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II – it would be a fairly simple two to three-hour adventure that primarily used existing artwork. As we worked on the additional content for those two games, we kept fiddling with the BG1.5 concept, and we had John Gallagher [lead artist on the original Baldur's Gate] do some early concept art for us.”

A cloud-based file repository allowed the artists to share area maps and concept art with the team, while story design began in Google Docs.

Daigle also took the opportunity to bring some previously unused Baldur’s Gate material back to life: “The original Baldur's Gate had a canceled second expansion pack after Tales of the Sword Coast. This was supposed to involve a sinister individual who is trapped in stone, but can reach into the world to influence events. The sages of Candlekeep were to send the party on a quest to retrieve the stone. We took some of these concepts and modified them for use in Siege of Dragonspear.”

An Ancient Code

Sketch of the Temple of Cyric.

While the ideas and concept art piled up, the technical team was faced with the challenge of building an entirely new game based on Baldur’s Gate’s Infinity Engine software. As Beamdog’s CTO Scott Brooks explains, that wasn’t easy, to say the least. “We started with the source code for Baldur's Gate II, which had networking support for serial connections, dial up modems, and IPX networking. It had piles of code to support CD swapping, and had the minimum system requirements of a Pentium 166 with 16MB of Ram. There were lots of things the engine was doing that it didn't need to do any more, and all of that code would get in the way of trying to make progress.”

Brooks spent a lot of time digging into that code to find out what it actually did. Building a version for today’s 64-bit Apple platforms is also a challenge for a 20-year-old, 16-bit engine that was created using assembly code. Even the tools and resources to work with the Infinity Engine are horribly ancient, dating back to the mid-’90s. “We upgrade them where we can,” says Daigle, “but it can still be a real bear to work with such old tools. I'm fairly certain we have a couple of applications that were written in Delphi back in 1996, and if anyone is a programmer, that tidbit will probably spook them.”

Final Renders of the Temple of Cyric.

An unexpected problem was how to keep consistency with the two other Baldur’s Gate games, which are literally from another generation. “It's a real challenge to build new content that looks good, but also looks ‘old’ so that it fits in with the existing content. It's an interesting and very fine line to walk, and it's a challenge that I imagine most teams don't have to face,” Daigle adds. 

Even when they got the engine working, the team still had to decide what to put in, with help from Wizards of the Coast. “As fans of the series, we've always had a lot of wants and wishes for stuff the player could do, and so we had a few ideas that we had been sitting on for over a decade,” says Daigle. “Also, years ago, before Throne of Bhaal was released, the folks at BioWare had put together a list of the most-requested features or scenarios that fans wanted to see in a future Infinity Engine game. They managed to check off a couple of those requests in Throne of Bhaal, and we checked off a bunch more of them with Siege of Dragonspear.”

The Plot Thickens

By mid-2013, Siege of Dragonspear’s plot was sketched out. All Daigle and his team had to do was write it. Not as easy a task as you might think, considering that the two Baldur’s Gate video games contain the same word count as 21 fantasy novels added together. “We were adding the equivalent of six novels right in the center of that,” said Daigle, “so we had to make sure that the new stuff harmonized with the original content.”

The Beamdog team designed and added four new joinable companions to Siege of Dragonspear. “Once we've established what class would play well, we start talking about story ideas for the character,” said Daigle, “We have a round of pitches, some refinements, and then we bounce our ideas back and forth with Wizards of the Coast to make sure we're on target with the lore. We strive to make characters that feel as if they have lives of their own beyond the player, and to really make that apparent.”

The team was keen for players to discover the plot twists for themselves, but at the time Daigle did reveal something for amateur detectives to puzzle over: “The story itself was actually inspired by the description of an item from Dungeons & Dragons. I won't reveal which item it was because that would spoil the plot, but I originally read about it 15 years ago and it has stuck with me ever since as a really cool idea.”

Share your impressions on Facebook, Twitter, and in our forums and tell us about your adventures in Siege of Dragonspear.

Neverwinter Nights: Love you to death, Valentine!

Love knows no bounds!

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Your plane is blessed

All because of you!

One of our Beamdog community members, Shaydh, drew these amazing Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Valentine’s Day cards of The Valsharess and Mephistopheles. Shaydh, you are our Valentine! A NWN:EE t-shirt is coming your way!

We’ll have a magical time together!

Who in the Forgotten Realms would you send a Valentine’s card to? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, or in the forums!

Need more Valentine's Day cards? Check out last year's set by ButterCheese!

Six Siders & Space Hamsters

James Ohlen and Cameron Tofer talk about the pen-and-paper game that saw the birth of Minsc and Boo.

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

The original Baldur's Gate companions have risen to iconic status among classic CRPG fans over the last nineteen years. The inspiration for many of these beloved companions, including Minsc, Edwin, and Xan, came from a pen-and-paper campaign that began around 1993. James Ohlen of BioWare was the DM, and the roster of players includes current giants in the RPG industry.

“I was looking to start a Forgotten Realms campaign and expand the number of players in my group,” Ohlen recalls, “so I advertised at the public library and local gaming stores. The response I got was much bigger than I expected.”

Cameron Tofer joined the group a few months after the game began. His character? A fierce ranger named Minsc.

“I was playing a lot of Civilization at the time and I played the Russians, and so Minsc was named after the city,” Cameron Tofer, Beamdog co-founder, explains. “He was based off some horrible rolls - his Intelligence, I just fumbled that. And because I joined late I was a couple of levels behind everyone.”

It was this level disparity that inspired one of the most adored animal companions of all time. “[Minsc] was knocked out in the first round of pretty much every fight,” Tofer says. “When I finally levelled up enough to get a companion, that's how I got Boo.”

According to Tofer, Boo was the only character he could play because Minsc was always knocked out.

Ross Gardner played Jon Icarus, the character who later inspired Baldur's Gate II villain Joneleth Irenicus. “I changed [the name] because of its connection with Greek mythology,” says Ohlen. Jeff Veitenheimer played a ranger named Sarevok, who not only became the villain of Baldur's Gate, but was also Minsc's big brother.

“[Sarevok] had a vorpal sword and was really badass. Everything was 'Sarevok this' and 'Sarevok that',” says Tofer.

Sean Carriere played Edwin, a wizard, and Dean Anderson played Bodi, Jon Icarus's sister. Ben Smedstad played Xan. “Ben was literally Xan,” Tofer recalls.

“A lot of lifelong friends came from the people I met in the Forgotten Realms campaign,” Ohlen says. “Some of those friends have gone on to found their own video game companies or take on senior roles at some of the biggest video game companies in the world.”

Though the characters would later go on to fill the ranks of Baldur's Gate companions, the game Ohlen ran didn't inspire the storyline for the game. Ohlen had ample experience crafting and DMing adventures. “I ran [a Forgotten Realms campaign] in my teenage years and at one point I was Dungeon Mastering three separate groups at the public library in Grande Prairie,” he says. “The campaign spanned many years, thousands of hours of Dungeon Mastering, and more than 30 different players.” The campaign that saw the rise of Minsc lasted for many years, until around 1999.

In that time, there were some constants in the adventures the party faced. “Every campaign we started, we'd be naked in a jail cell,” says Tofer. “[Ohlen would say], 'Ok, you wake up. Naked. In a jail cell.' 'OH NO, NOT AGAIN! EVERY TIME!'”

“Cam is over exaggerating a little,” adds Ohlen. “I did use the prisoner trope quite a bit, but not all the time. The reason I used it so often probably stems from the fact that the D&D published adventure Scourge of the Slave Lords is one of my favorites of all time.”

Shades of the Baldur's Gate II opening scene, with the player character locked in Irenicus's dungeon? “[The trope] did probably influence Baldur's Gate II,” Ohlen says.

“Oh yeah,” adds Tofer. “It's a classic.”

Minsc developed over the course of the game, though his history in the pen-and-paper campaign is not the same as the character's in the video game. “Eventually when we started leveling up, Minsc was pretty badass,” Tofer recalls. And on the character sheet, Minsc is listed as having a sister. “Yeah, but she came in late, she didn't really play a role,” says Tofer. “It was just Minsc lying unconscious and Boo running around doing everything.”

Minsc and Boo had “some kind of mental link” says Tofer, which made it easier to play the hamster. Perhaps Boo is the one influencing Minsc in Baldur's Gate.

Luckily for us, Tofer saved many of the character sheets from the original campaign.

Behold Minsc's original character sheet, over 20 years old and full of detail about the original butt-kicking ranger.

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 experience with pen-and-paper adventures.