The Mage's Tale

Partner studio: Puny Human

Concept

A VR dungeon crawler set in the Bard's Tale universe, played as a wizard's apprentice who gathers mystical ingredients through dungeons and combines them into hundreds of craftable spells. Developed in parallel with the partner's flagship RPG, sharing assets and tools across two separate teams.

Requirement

The partner needed the crafting-component library built out, plus environmental assets and puzzle props. The constraint was VR-specific: every ingredient sits in a glass jar the player can pick up and rotate at close range, so each asset had to hold detail under direct inspection from every angle rather than at normal gameplay distance. Assets also had to be authored against a provided set of master materials, to match an art style being set by another team.

Approach

Artists worked from brief ingredient descriptions and the provided master materials to design and model 20 distinct crafting ingredients. A series of stone tablets was built, each carrying carved graphic stories the player deciphers as part of the dungeon puzzle mechanics.

Environmental contributions included background assets, vegetation and a large underground tree pillar — a carved trunk with an intricate root system protruding top and bottom — built from provided reference sheets as the focal point of its space.

Full access to the game build allowed every asset to be tested in the exact lighting and gameplay conditions the player would meet it in. The pipeline ran on Z-Brush, Modo, Photoshop, Substance Painter, Substance Designer and Unreal Engine 4.

Delivery scope

• 3D modeling and art production
• Hard-surface and organic asset creation
• Material and texture authoring
• Environment art and vegetation
• Puzzle prop design
• In-engine integration and validation (UE4)

Results

• 20 crafting ingredients, a stone tablet series, background assets, vegetation and a focal underground tree pillar delivered
• Completed on time and within budget
• 6–10 person-months delivered, across 2 artists
• Title scored 8/10 by UploadVR, which singled out the “addictive spellcrafting system”; Metacritic 72
• Established Substance Painter as a core studio tool for all subsequent work
• Opened a client relationship that ran through four further titles across six years

Engine: Unreal Engine 4.