Ravenskye City? What is that?

I have been wanting to post art and talk about all the hard work that my crew have accomplished while working on Ravenskye City. Now, I feel like since the game is out(has been for several months now), I guess I can talk about what I've been up to!!

First the company. I started working at 6Waves Lolapps about 7 months ago, and I immediately started working on a new game called Ravenskye City. It's a casual facebook game. Before joining Lolapps(as it was called when I joined), I had no idea what facebook games were. Especially the word 'casual', 'mid core' and 'hard core' games. Didn't even know there were that many levels. I heard of Farmville, etc and Zynga of course, but anything else about social games, not so much. Lolapps was an up and coming company with lots of promising ideas, and what I liked about it the most was it's laid back culture. Also, everyone seemed to be smiling and having a good time. A great indicator of a good company. If you ever interview at a company and everyone looks stressed out, well, there's probably a good reason for that!!

So now, Ravenskye City. It is a 'casual social game'. The market is pretty specific too. When I started working on it, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to get into. Plus, they told me that the game is to be out in 4 months! I was use to working on a character for that long in feature films!! Now, they are telling me that I have to design something like 18 characters, a map that the game takes place on, and several unique sets! With lots of props! So even though I was really scared, I went full steam ahead. I feel like, looking back now, it has been a grace of some force out there that has blessed me with such a great team of artists. It's really rare to have a whole team of artists, game designers, programmers, and all the rest of the unique teams that make up a group that are involved in a social game world to all get along and all have the same goals!! I can go on and on about my team, but before I get too wordy and boring, let me just say that it has been just amazing.

There are several differences working on social games like Ravenskye City, and Feature Animated films. First, animated films takes a lot of people, especially 3D. We're talking several hundreds.
A game like ours, well, it's a totally different animal. I don't know the exact head count, but I think it's less than 40. We don't get to spend too much time iterating on anything, simply because we just don't have the time. After our initial release of the game, we were already developing content packs. It's basically new game feature that goes out every week. So my artists and I are continuously busy creating new art. We never got a wrap party like we use to on films, because our project never wrapped. It's actually just beginning. Maybe when the game stops making money someday and we have to shut it down, then they will give us a wrap party??!! Ha ha.

Well, I will try to be better organized and try to show some new and old art that I have worked on. But meanwhile, please go check out some art that we released to a community blogger who is a huge fan of our game. Click here.
You can see some art from my artists and me. Keep checking back. There will be more.