As I said a while ago, I still have a folder full of concepts I made for Runescape that I never had the chance to publish.

Unfortunately my memory is what it is, and most of the times I have just a fuzzy recollection of what those concepts were for.
(No, it’s not because I partied too much during the nineties, my memory was already shit way before then).

Anyway, I do remember that these environments were made for Ashdale, the new starting spot meant to replace the venerable Tutorial Island, which had been there since forever.
The game-play for new players was confusing at best back then (not a quality that a tutorial is supposed to have, right?), and at some point a couple of years ago we took on the task of reworking that part of Runescape.

To prepare for that, I spent quite a few weeks working on a 3D model of Ashdale on Sketchup.
Unfortunately I forgot to take it with me, so it’s kind of lost forever.
Which is a bit sad, I was quite happy with that grey box.

It took several weeks for me to fine tune the foot print to accommodate all the requirements of design and at the same time make it as pretty as we meant to.
Loads of plans, meetings, walks to people’s desk, tweaks and then other meetings and then other tweaks.
Sketchup is wonderful for that.

After we had settled on what went where, we started with the actual concepts.
This is a sketch I made of one of the big statues that now stand between the main island and the church.

Again, just a sketch, we changed the statues and the footprint a lot after that.

The following is instead a view of the South side of the island, with its quarry and the small pier.
I painted this on top of a Sketchup screen-grab.
That’s pretty much what I use it for when I’m designing complex environments.

I can’t find in-game screenshots of this bit, but I remember it being fairly close to the sketch, which always fills a Concept Artist’s heart with fuzzy feelings.

I also remember that after this I had to move onto another project, so other people had to finish the whole tutorial thing.

Bonus content: in the Concept folder I just came across the desktop wallpaper I had on my main machine for four years.
I present you THE BEST IMAGE ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET.
You’re welcome.

by Paolo Puggioni