Here is an example, a set of stairs added to a roof structure:

It looks ok, but looking close up you can see how flimsy the roof attachment is:
Or the way the railings are assembled together:

Deanna showed us that it would make more sense to extend the main roof support to accommodate for the stairs:

An in the case of the railings, to do a better job showing the assembled pieces, removing the awkward intersections:

Another example is this stone wall door frame. It lacks any assembly detail for its size, making it feel it was made from one single gigantic piece of stone:
And here is the revised version:

Another type of issue is how two different surfaces meet. The more detailed the island gets, the more these stand out as incomplete. As an example, the way this wood structure connects with the floor:

And after the revision:

Some of this work might seem minute but it really makes the whole environment feel more grounded, adding a lot to the experience!

Here is a screenshot from another angle:

Most of the key detail has been added to the walls and I feel, if we had to send this build to E3, it wouldn't be terrible.
We managed to get in some really nice framing details that I won't spoil here but I'm sure players will appreciate them!
Here is a shot showing the ruined walls work.

Tomorrow I'll make sure I walk around a lot to hunt down any major issues, get the overall color vibe (mostly get more variation on the walls) and any extra details.

Orsi's Vegetation Update:

To give a little variation to the post today, I thought I would include some things I have been working on as well. While Luis had been working on the structures around the entry yard, I have been placing the vegetation and cables, and re-working some puzzle related things. Laying out the vegetation early on was important to give the place a sense of scale and to get the overall vibe of the place. I am very happy we got an other chance to re-do all of it, because I think it turned out much more magical this time around:

Even though it's a much smaller area than it used to be before, I used a different combination of plants in different areas, so people would be less likely to get lost:

I still have polish to do, to match everything to the walls Luis finalizes tomorrow, and then we should be ready for E3!

The center building is now complete and we got the layout for the ruined walls so the major task for tomorrow is to get them all detailed (very time consuming!)

And finally some new interior spaces that you can't really see from the previous angles.

Orsi is in charge of the vegetation (she is amazing at it) so that is one big chunk of work I don't have to worry about!
I'll be aiming to have everything done by tomorrow so I can use Friday for polishing and any major issues that I might have missed.

Here are the new modular pieces that were done for detailing:

We just finished the day by meeting with the architects and discussing the interior layout of the space so tomorrow I'll start on the interior building and ruin walls.
Here is how it currently looks:

Last week, as you could see from previous screenshot, we got  a rough layout of the area in the engine and tried to find answers to any remaining issues.

Today the goal was to sort out the design  and navigation of the main entrance and the small towers.
This is one of my first mockups that didn't look quite right.

The architects took a look at it and provided some 3d models of how castle stairs are usually assembled as well as sketches of how it should look:

After, I tried to figure out the details from references and what "pieces" I would need to build the structure.
Two years ago I went for vacations in Portugal and tried to see some castles. One of them in Guimaraes struck me as very similar to the entry yard. I made sure I got some pictures and now they are proving to be useful with angles that would be hard to get from online research.

Here is the current result using different modular stairs/floor/battlement pieces:

And the current overall look by the end of today:

Tomorrow I'll be tackling  the rest of the exterior walls and the 3 other towers.

If you are interested you can take a look at the slides PDF here:
GDC2014_LuisAntonio_TheArtOfTheWitness

Unfortunately the PDF merges animated slides so there is some content that you won't be able to see and you are missing the actual talk but it should be available in a few weeks at the GDC Vault!

*UPDATE - The talk is now available at the GDC Vault, you can  check it here:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020552/The-Art-of-The

Just before I left my last job I was working as a Lead/Art Director on a marketing driven project focused on selling as many units as possible. On one side I had high level decisions being made by stockholders whose focus is on turning a profit while on the other side there was the development team who truly believed they would be able to make a good game.

Also I was surrounded by schedules, performance reviews, hierarchical titles, producers, human resources, bonus system and all the other corporate systems that eventually dilute the organic process of doing something creative. While I understand the logic behind it I  realized that is not the reason why I joined the video games industry and that something wasn’t right.

Now, after these few months, the answers for these questions became clear. Its all based on trust. In this project, all the decisions we arrive at are very organic. Jonathan has a very clear vision of what he wants and the fact that we can see it and believe in it makes it extremely logical and simple.

Our passion for what we do (and what we would probably be doing on our free time if we weren’t being paid for it) gets distilled directly into the game in a very rewarding process.How much and how we give it depends entirely on us and that creates a natural challenge and pressure that most AAA companies cannot provide.

This trust leads to respect and it creates a very unique work environment. This is something that I’ve never seen with all the project management, task scheduling and scrum meetings that try to fix an inherently broken game. I don’t think video games can be produced like an assembly line, at least not games that have something meaningful to say, and I’m glad that I found people that are doing it the right way.

All this may sound trivial but probably 90% of the game developers that I know will understand how big of an issue this is. I still believe big companies can change their ways and make the same profit if not more, but it has to start from the bottom, the people who are hard at work making the games.

As for the second part, I would like to share what we have been trying to do with the many island panels. As you might already know the player has to solve different puzzles using these panel interfaces scattered around the island.

I started my research by looking at what materials they could be made of, what technology they would use and how they would be assembled and how all this could relate with the different areas and narrative of the game.

This first set of images shows some proposals of how the panel screens could possibly look. I tried not to focus so much on the gameplay but more on ideas that could lead to further discussions among the team.

After some solid feedback and a couple of art meetings I was able to understand what was working or not and decided to do a new set of proposals. Also this time I tried to focus on the more technical aspect of getting these panels to work in the game and if the effort we would have to put into them would be worthwhile.

The same amount of work went into the structure of the panels and how they would be assembled. This time, working with the architects gave valuable input into understanding how they would actually be built in the environment and the amount of work required. On this image you can see a screen capture of several prototypes before being tested ingame.

These are usually modelled very fast with just base colors so I can do several iterations until I find something that I'm happy with.
And finally here is how some of them are looking in-game. They are still in concept but by placing them in the correct context makes it a lot easier to understand what is working or not.

I've worked on trees for games over the years, and I've come to a conclusion: There's no good way to make them currently. Trees reject the idea of low poly versions of themselves by their very nature, and what you're left with is many unsatisfactory ways of making them. It's up to the artist to pick which one of these techniques to use and to do their best to make it work. That choice depends on a lot of things. Does it have to be real-time, or can it be pre-rendered? Where will the player be when he sees the tree? Up close, far away, underneath, from above, or (in the worst case) all of these? Will there be a few trees or a forest of them? Then there's the engine constraints.  Overdraw, poly counts, texture space, LOD systems, lighting and light maps; all these affect how the trees need to be created. And none of that is even scratching the surface on the style you want the trees to have.

Still, I like a challenge as much as the next person.

Here's an early visual mockup of the game that contains some trees. I didn't actually make this, but it did give me some direction is where to go. As you can see, the trees are very colorful and full of volume. I wasn't sure how close I could get to this, but I was going to give it a try. The problem with most low-poly game trees is that they are made with large sheets of polygons with branch and bough textures on them...and while this is certainly a way of making game trees, they usually can't be considered volumetric.

The current trees I have right now started from a lucky accident. Early on the engine couldn't handle alpha maps, so I want to make a bough structure that would look vaguely leafy without being too many polys and without using opacity maps. That's how I came up with this.

It's basically a ton of triangles sitting in a bowl. The bowl is there to simplify the bottom and hide the triangle nature of the triangles. It worked fine for the time I needed it. Recently I started adding a bunch of trees to the world and I wanted something fairly lightweight for even the large trees (the one I had done just before that was 40,000 polys, which was way too big). So I went to the old non-opacity tree, added some opacity maps and tried it out. And, surprisingly, it worked really well. It was giving me a volume I didn't expect, and it looked really good at a distance.

Not only that, I took a look at them with only the lightmaps on and the structure looked really nice...especially the branches underneath.

They were still too heavy though, being 12 thousand polys. Worse, they looked really bad up close and you could see that, what read as a nice, thick foliage from a distance, was really a mess of triangles.

So the past few days I've been trying to make the trees look better from a close distance and be lower poly without losing what I liked about the previous ones. After a bit of struggle, I got something that seems to do the trick. Ignacio helped a lot, making a shader that made polys disappear when they became too edge on to the camera, which eliminated many ugly artifacts. The foliage is half the polys of the other trees, plus it looks a lot better close up. Here's a close shot of it, plus a comparison shot with an older tree.

I still have a bunch of other ideas I want to add to these to make them look better, but I think we're on the right track to getting trees that really do have a nice amount of volume and harken back to the early mockups.