by Tiago Bonifácio, Loremaster

How do you create a cohesive and unique world when several different people get to have a say in it?

First things first, Tiago here. I’m the leader of the Lore team at Loot, which means I’m the one responsible for figuring out the answer to the question above. Relics Untold is a project unlike anything else we’ve worked on before and presented some new challenges because of that. For starters, there are several different teams contributing to the creation of the world, each with its own view of “how things should be”. Sometimes those visions for the world are aligned, but when they are not, we need to align them. Second, a lot of the people who work with us don’t actually work from inside our offices. Some of the people helping us build this world are spread all over Brazil and even beyond, like our extraordinary friend, Tracy Hickman. These are just some of the hurdles we had to overcome for the project to flourish. I’m going to tell a little story now about how everything came together.

Let me introduce you to some of the key characters in this story. First, there’s Alvaro Ribeiro, our Art Director, and the art team, who are the ones actually bringing this world to life through 2D illustrations and 3D art for the miniatures. We also have Leo Cunha, our Lead Game Designer, and his team, who set the parameters for what each character is capable of in the world. Finally, there’s me and my team, and we are responsible for creating the world those characters live in. There are a lot of other teams here at Loot and they are all involved to some degree with Relics Untold, but the Art, Game Design, and Lore teams are the ones directly connected to the worldbuilding of Relics Untold, so they are going to be the main characters for this story. 

The first team to start work on worldbuilding was actually Leo’s. This came about because before we ever talked about what the world would look like, we had a prototype of the game that was being played internally, which helped us figure out how this world should feel when you play in it. Whatever we built from then on needed to reflect that initial seed that the game designers planted. An interesting thing to note is that those first games, with the first placeholder units, told us a lot about the directions we were going to be taking. Because Leo had created, on one side, units that were cheap and weak but very dangerous when swarming in great numbers or supported by a powerful leader, and we knew we would need to create a society that reflected that. At the very least we would need a leader willing to use people as cannon fodder to achieve victory. Similarly, we had other units that were very good at defense, which evoked the idea of a nation hiding behind great walls. Throughout the worldbuilding process, we had to keep asking ourselves: what kind of society would create this character?

Taking the initial mechanics as presented to us by Leo and his team, the lore team came in to produce a rough outline of what the world would look like. To do this we had to ask all the members of the team: “What do we actually want?”. Everyone had their answers, about the books and movies they loved, the games they liked to play, and what kind of world they expected. It was my team’s job to bring all of that together into a cohesive vision, but it was still missing something. A little bit of spice, if you will. What we had at this point was a rough draft that could evolve in many different directions, but we wanted this world to be unique, original, striking… It was time to bring in the big guns. This is when Tracy comes into the story. He joined the Lore team as our main writer and worldbuilder and brought 40 years’ worth of knowledge, experience, and pure magic. He immediately knew the right questions to ask to provoke us into new directions and has been working since then to create a world that is really exciting. 

And that was great timing because at this point Alvaro and his team were just itching to get to work on the art. And get to work they did. They started by producing general content on each of the factions, as they had been outlined by the Lore team. This includes things like architecture, landscapes, clothing, locations, and objects of significance. We did that because characters don’t exist in a vacuum, they always come from somewhere. Each character has both a gameplay role that it’s trying to fulfill but also a place in the world that influences how they will do it and what they’ll look like while trying. The art team is absolutely amazing, and Alvaro made sure that the world that Tracy was writing would come to life in the most beautiful renditions ever.

During this process, Alvaro and the art team had a lot of questions that directed the conversations the Lore team and I were having with Tracy. They would ask us something like: “We need to create a spellcaster of this or that faction… How are they different from your run-of-the-mill wizard?”. This meant we had to ask ourselves: “Where does magic come from in our world? How is this faction’s magic different? Is there anything else special about this character?”. Once we had a couple of answers to all of those questions, we took them back to Alvaro and Leo, so that we could find something that was both visually interesting and that matched the feel the unit had during gameplay. It was an iterative process, meaning we had to go through several iterations of the same idea before we figured out what the best answer to all of those questions was. The advantage of an iterative process is that, once you get through the first couple of characters, the rest of the faction becomes much clearer, and you have to do a lot fewer variations. Starting a brand new dark fantasy world from zero was like assembling a puzzle in which you have to draw the first pieces yourself. After you do that and assemble the first couple of chunks of the puzzle, the rest of the picture becomes clearer and clearer as time goes on. Now, we did make some mistakes along the way, the normal pains of birthing a whole new world I guess, but we did learn a lot through the process. 

The first thing we had to do was translate the needs of our teams into a language the other teams could understand. Good communication between teams is one of those things that is talked about ad nauseam but with good reason. In our case, we had to take people who have very different approaches to the creative process and learn enough about each other to communicate effectively. Alvaro is the artist worried about creating art that is unique and striking, while I’m the lore nerd worried about creating a world where everything is coherent enough that it feels real. Leo is usually worried both about the art being a faithful representation of what the characters can do in-game and about the implications of the lore we create now for future game design (which I’m also worried about). The key here was to really talk about the vision for the world and the game, and I do mean talk. We had several meetings to figure out what each of us expected. We don’t have a person who has the power to unilaterally change the art, the game design, and the lore, but as long as we all have the same vision for what we are trying to accomplish, we pull in the same direction instead of against each other. Once we had this vision figured out we tried to communicate it to everyone involved, and this helped smooth things along.  

A project as big as this is going to have a lot of creative input from a lot of different sources. This input is good to have but difficult to control, so one of the things we did right from the start was that we picked the main stakeholders. Alvaro, Leo, and I had several responsibilities during this whole process. We had to filter the input of each of our teams, bring it to the table, and make the final decisions about what this world was going to look like. Some very good ideas ended up being set aside because they didn’t fit the puzzle we are assembling right now, but I’m sure they will come back in the future to compose another puzzle. 

There are a lot more things we could talk about with respect to Relics Untold worldbuilding, so in the future, we will be showing you a little bit more about how each of the factions and some of the main characters came about. Be sure to check out the faction’s page for the latest updates and stay tuned for more articles like this for a look behind the curtain.