The Brutal Art of Brutal Legend

News posted by Ryan on March 27th, 2009 at 5:09pm GMT

The ‘Brutal Art of Brutal Legend’ panel is now over at this year’s Game Developers Conference, and going off Kotaku’s write-up it sounds like it was a pretty superb showing:

“Here are the ingredients to a successful GDC panel: visually entertaining slides, more than one trailer, halfway-decent public speaker, a game that’s actually coming out in the near future. And Tim Schafer.”

Aside from a lot of technical talk — this is a game developers conference, after all — Double Fine art director Lee Petty talks about the challenges of making a huge open-world game that’s so artistically rich, and has all sorts of different themes to portray (goth, emo, etc).

He also stresses how important good sky art is, seeing as it fills at least half the screen in many games and yet is often neglected by developers. Sounds like they’re doing a great job of doing the sky justice:

“A tranquil orange evening sky turned into a swirling cyclone of purple with long streaks of lighting, then it became a clear blue daytime dotted with fluffy white clouds before melting into a pitch-black night lit up by a meteor shower.”

There’s no word on whether or not we’re actually going to see the videos used to demonstrate the game during this presentation, although there’s supposedly another embargo that ends in a week so they may appear around then. Unless some naughty site with little integrity goes ahead and posts them anyway!

Update

[March 28th at 12:42am GMT+1] Game developer favourite Gamasutra has now unleashed its write-up of the talk, which goes into quite a bit more detail than Kotaku’s.