Summary:

The campaign map in HEROish was a unique challenge. The creative goal was to make this a “living” map with an inked watercolor look that faded into sepia tones outside the player’s visibility radius. The map would update itself through exploration and unlocking new regions.

Most elements in the map were 2D illustrations provided by concept artists. All of the characters and animated objects were 3D and needed to fit the style of the concept artist. Notably, the 3D objects needed to sort correctly with the 2D illustrated elements, meaning the final 3D renders needed 2D sprites. This was a tricky problem, but the final solution resulted in the 3D objects being rendered into a render target texture atlas from an orthographic camera. A quad running a custom shader indexed each correct character with proper animations and achievable sorting.

Locked, cross-hatched zones were achieved with a straightforward zone mask mapped to world space positions. The persistent mask and visibility radius were dithered with a painterly brush mask to diminish the lack of resolution and make the transitions more organic.