Earlier this week the first concept images appeared in our Slack team. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect – I’d been anticipating this moment for several weeks and still hadn’t quite worked out how I was going to approach it. Half of me was calm and professional, the other half was screaming like a fanboy. I’ve seen many pieces of artwork for many concepts over the years, but I knew these would be different, more special somehow.
My initial thought was: ‘It’s alive!’, and then my 15 years of gaming industry experience kicked in and I began to thoroughly tear it apart… Okay, so perhaps that’s an exaggeration. The artwork was excellent, and a pleasure to review, made even more enjoyable because it was the first time either myself or John had seen our words transformed into images.
And I think that is the critical lesson I (re-)learned this week: to detach yourself from the concept enough that you can be objective, but not so much that you lose the sheer joy of it. I wrote in an earlier blog post about sometimes falling in love with the process if not necessarily the project, and I suppose I had developed a practised ease over the last few years for reviewing work. But this was different because it meant so much more to me, and I didn’t need to ‘fake’ it.
Since then we’ve had several more concepts drop into our inboxes, and the progression has been astounding. The more the concepts come to life, the more unique this universe we have created becomes. Of course, it’s all well and good me saying that in advance of our official unveiling – if the internet has taught me anything, it’s that there’s very little room for objective criticism.
There’s no harm in us keeping this to ourselves for a little while longer, is there..?