00:01Rated T for Teen
00:16The first thing that appealed to me as somebody who's worked with a number of similar RTS format and genres
00:23and was the scope and the range of this particular project
00:27We were going from medieval sword and sorcery type genre all the way up to the future science fiction
00:35With the prior games in this franchise, there was, I believe, a lot more effort to follow historical accuracy
00:44with the characters, with the buildings, the environments throughout
00:47We decided that we wanted to be able to push it a little further in terms of fantasy, fun, exaggeration
00:55a little more over the top and a little more stylization
01:06It just so happened that I'm a history buff
01:09I've already done a lot of research into military history, costumes, armor, warfare
01:17When you start really delving into the history, you realize that all the cultures, all the societies, all the armies
01:25borrowed from each other
01:27And there were elements of western armor incorporated into the Mideast who were borrowing from the Mongols
01:33We were able to borrow from all these separate cultures, architectural features from Thailand, from China, from Japanese
01:40And kind of blend them together and come up with an overall look
01:43I would look at a lot of Tibetan architecture, look at Tibetan armor
01:47Because it has such an exotic feel to it
01:50And everybody by now is already familiar with the samurai warrior
01:54You've already seen the ninja done a thousand times
01:58But there's so many other little cultures and interesting art styles and feelings and flavors
02:04From all these other unique far eastern cultures
02:08That it was really a lot of fun to research those, explore those
02:12And then try to meld it all together into something that was a little more interesting
02:17The sum was a lot more interesting than the parts
02:20I always tried to make it historically accurate enough
02:24That somebody who's well versed in history could look at that and easily recognize
02:28What the unit was supposed to be, what period it represented, what region that it should be from
02:33While you may not see any one particular unit depicted in the history books
02:41I don't think any one of our characters would be out of place historically
02:51I had a pretty strong background in working in science fiction and fantasy
02:56The western mechs, when I started out coming up with the ideas for them
03:03I thought in terms of animal forms and functions
03:06But I was trying to come up with locomotion and silhouettes that were a little more unusual
03:14On the far eastern units
03:16That got even more creative in terms of how far we could push the fantasy element
03:22And so I like the future units a lot for the far east too
03:28I tried to maintain some faithfulness in that whatever we created as bizarre as it ended up looking
03:35For the most part it was rooted in reality
03:39That it felt like it had form function and that it would really actually work
03:44In the sense that it was supposed to
03:49We always had a conscious effort to try to maintain a completely separate look for each region
03:56So that when you're looking at this from the RTS perspective
04:00From a distance and looking top down on some things
04:04The player doesn't have to stop and study something to figure out what's going on
04:09I knew that we were going to have to try to keep the textures and the geometry as individual as
04:17possible
04:18Using organic shapes for the far east and more boxier geometric shapes for the western units
04:26In order to fit the criteria that was being established for the mid-east
04:31We started creating more of a post-apocalyptic feel to it
04:34So there's always a temptation that while you're working on a western unit
04:39You'd like to use some post-apocalyptic elements
04:41But you realize that you need to confine that to the other regions
04:46So again you have that separate identity for those regions
04:51Those are the kind of details that we were really paying attention to
04:54That may be subtle and people may take for granted or might not even notice on a conscious level
04:59Where we really spent a lot of time thinking about these things and trying to solve these problems
05:06I think we succeeded in that pretty well and I'm pretty happy with that
05:10Empire Earth 3
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