How important is storytelling in your environmental art? When you create something like that, do you flesh out an entire backstory on your own? Do you find yourself creating an internal logic, a history, a story of your own when designing these things?
TL;DREnvironment artists generally build internal stories about who lives in a location, which adds depth, though the MMO format limits some dressing; it ranges from large-scale ideas to small details.
Sure. I'd say almost all environment artists do it. Whatever location we build, you build internal monologues and storylines. Who lives here? How would they interact with this space? It just gives way more depth to the location, and you see it. You can play a game and you think, wow, someone's really thought about this. You can really get that depth. It's a little bit different with our game because it's an MMO. We have to be very specific and we can't do certain dressing things, but every artist working on that location would have been really thinking about things, the type of people that work there. What's really cool is when Dave comes to visit, or you have a conversation with Dave or Will or something like that, and you hear them go through it and you hear their perceptions or ideas, and ideas just really start rolling through. That's probably one of the most fun parts of being an environment artist, doing that storytelling, because it's like a creative itch that you can't find anywhere else.
Yeah, and it goes from the large scale to the small scale. You're thinking about what this world is, but you're also thinking about, oh, this guy placed a coffee mug here and left a stain, right? All of that together helps to tell the story of what this place is.