Mezzanine Stairs

We are approaching our next milestone of appearing on Steam wishlists, and so our continued assembly of marketing material grows ever more vital! With the art of World's End being one of its weaker points, this process can be particularly daunting. Nonetheless, considering we are releasing on Steam and other professional game platforms, we need to assemble artwork that can stand (or at least slouch) alongside that of our rivals in competitive marketplaces. Above you can see the current state of our main poster, variations of which we'll use to create the myriad assets demanded by game platforms.

For those of you who have been around for a while, you may remember our old World's End Chapter 1 thumbnail from Newgrounds and elsewhere. While serviceable and soulful, it was admittedly pretty sloppy, and our first task in assembling new graphical assets was polishing up the character artwork. For easy comparison, here are Ivan, Tevoran, and Ysabel in their new and old forms:

As for the background, that presented a greater challenge. We weren't initially sure what would work best in terms of suggesting the environment in which the gameplay takes place, though we settled on the idea of using the Tiervan slum background as seen in the old World's End Chapter 1 title screen. Unfortunately, the existing art was far too primitive to consider using in a professional thumbnail.

To bring this quaint background up to modern standards, countless hours would need to be spent on its refinement. Time being a luxury we do not possess in droves, we resorted to plugging a modified version of this art into Dream, an AI art generation/modification website that, while quite limited, is free to use. While using an AI tool is hardly something we joyfully embrace, its use was deemed a necessary evil in order to allow us to swiftly achieve our goals without squandering time better spent working on our actual game itself.

On that note, engine (re)development along with finalizing Chapter 4 artwork continues. It's been a long, laborious process, but every day brings us closer to completion. As always, thank you all for your continued interest in our work.