This is one of the projects I worked on for Faycrest Studios and their game Solita. This is the castle of the princess the game is named after. My contract with the team ended before we settled on a final design, but I enjoyed the process a ton and feel good with the progress that was being made.
My goal while I was designing the architecture for this region of the game was to combine Greek and German architecture together to create something new. That turned out to be a difficult challenge, since most of the German architecture we were referencing were owned by common folk and most of the Greek were temples and other religious sites. I decided to lean harder into one style than the other for the different aspects of the city, German for the town and Greek for the castle. The city that this castle is within is the most wealthy of all the regions in the game, so I tried to push that idea and convey a sense of regality and abundance in the design.
I settled on this design and made a 3D blockout for it, but the team and I decided that the castle would be too wide with a design like this and wanted something more thin with lots of vertical elements. I threw together this quick bash of my blockout with the in-game blockout of the level and it helped us see how the scale of the castle would be way too massive compared to everything else.
With this new goal in mind, I thought that leaning into the German side of the architecture style would work better for the new elements of the castle. I tried out multiple sketches and was struggling with finding a silhouette that felt dense with interesting details without becoming too chaotic. I eventually settled on this final sketch which started as a large triangular shape that I kept carving into with various architectural details. This helped keep an overall simple and readable shape that the castle as a whole makes while still having lots of smaller points of interest.
I created another 3D blockout for the castle and began to paint over it in Photoshop. The small cubes around the image represent the player to show the overall scale of the castle. We left the castle at this stage and didn’t iterate on it further because the scale of the castle to the player in some areas was too small but we couldn’t simply scale everything up because the castle was conflicting with our camera (a fixed side view with a slight downward tilt). It was a great learning experience though and really illustrated to me how much the function of a design impacted its visual appearance.