Gloomhaven - The Dungeon Crawl - Ep.01: Conception

Hello everyone, I'm Julien, I'm the Gloomhaven Producer at Asmodee Digital. Hi, I'm Craig and I'm the Executive Producer at Flaming Fowl Studios. Hi, I'm Mike and I'm the Creative Director at Flaming Fowl Studios. At Flaming Fowl, we've got years of experience between all the members of the team.

A lot of us are from ex-Lionhead. I first heard about Gloomhaven after the first kickstarter, which I was a bit annoyed I missed out on. The second time Isaac put it on Kickstarter, I got in there and backed it myself. It's a fantastic board game with a huge amount of depth.

I've got a beard, so it appeals to me directly! The more complex, the more depth, the more gameplay, the better it is for me. It's something my wife and I play loads, which is great for us because it's a really deep and interesting game. It was fantastic news when we were talking to Asmodee Digital about making a digital version of it.

Isaac came up with a very original high fantasy setting for Gloomhaven. It was a good surprise to discover new races and characters. He didn't fall into the usual trap of going with Elves and Orcs, Like some people have used in the past, or even overused.

It's really refreshing to discover a brand new world like this one. It has been an honor giving flesh to this world! Because Isaac has put together a really interesting world, with very unique characters. There are no Orcs, Goblins, and all those standard tropes.

He's created completely new races of creatures. Really interesting characters as well. All the heroes have quite interesting abilities they use, and the combinations between them all. It just gives you a huge amount of gameplay potential. For us, Gloomhaven was just the game to adapt.

The richness, the amount of rules and mechanics. It's just ready to adapt, out of the box. So for us it was pretty obvious that we wanted to make a video game version. What is challenging about this game is just the sheer size of it. On top of that, there are a lot of abilities in Gloomhaven.

At my last count, there were 1,020 for the characters in the game. And then you have...I can't remember the last count of how many items there were...130 items. The scale of the game is gigantic. One of the things we've been really keen to get right on this game is the graphical style and the approach that we've taken with the artistic elements of the game.

We really wanted to make the game stand out and do the board game justice. So, something we've tried to do is have a mix of both 3D and hand drawn. So although the game is in full 3D and looks great, Isometric camera, every texture on every character, item, wall, furniture is all hand drawn.

So it has this really great artistic style to it, but at the same time it looks fantastic from a 3D point of view. The visual style extends into the magic that we've done. Obviously the magic is something that didn't exist in the board game. There is no visual representation of what that is.

We've done a really good job of making it quite visceral. This was one of the things you were very keen on. Just trying to make sure everything was high energy. That's been cool to do. Kinda taking those limited instructions that we've gotten from the board game and actually, how do we realize that in this new 3D world.

One of the challenges we've had with taking the board game to a full 3D setting is that we've got a lot of the backgrounds of the characters on the little standees, and we've got some floor spaces, icons and counters that represent boulders, bits of wall or some water.

Apart from that, there is very little concept art for us to really base anything on. So, it's been an interesting challenge to take that basic information that we have and talk to Isaac to come up with some new techniques on how we can really represent the enemy characters.

Working with Isaac has been brilliant He gives really good feedback and seems happy with everything that we do, which is one of the main things I like about him! It's been great to have such close contact with the designer of the board game. So for anyone that plays Gloomhaven, they're gonna love this game.