Inside NABIYA’s creation process #1
The Avenged Sevenfold experience has been available on The Sandbox for a month. We hope you’ve had a great time playing it.
We want to take this opportunity to share with you the creation process with you. We were overwhelmed by the positive comments we had at the launch. Have a watch on the trailer right here:
We started off around two major inspirations from the band. The art team came up with 2 distinctive zones on a 2X1 map.
The healing zone: a giant troglodyte skull adorned with its Native American headdress and overlooking the land. The Giant Skull became a landmark for the experience representing spirituality.
We started to terraform the Deathbat into the Giant Skull. The early tests are on the left below:
How to smooth out blocky effect: make a whole asset
The results being unsatisfactory for our standard, we switched to modelisation and made the Giant skull a whole asset (instead of terraforming it like in Minecraft). We loved pushing the technical limits to get this smoothness out of blocks. The challenge is to keep the creation within the optimal required number of facettes and polygons. Every builder out there would know the pain.
The hellish zone: a place of perdition in an insane and psychedelic Vegas. To this, we added some references to Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, from which the band got inspirations for the iconic music video “Bat Country”.
The casino/club was made in a modular way to be unstructured. For the animated neon assets, we had to go back and forth between VoxEdit and GameMaker to test the “emissive colors” whose rendering was sometimes hazardous; until we found the right shade.
Between these two extremes, discover the ’’City of Evil’’ (eponymous title of the breakthrough album).
Several spots will allow fans to reach the Deathbat club Gallery in the city’s underground.
Fans will surely find a lot of references to the band’s imagery and story.
Not just a band
Five members claiming they have all been kicked out of Catholic school. The names of their band and guitarist coming straight out of the Bible :
Genesis 4:15, the chapter of the Bible in which the story of Cain and Abel takes place. : “Then the LORD said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.”