Pixel-art RTS concept candidates: designing high-elf units, buildings and a portrait for one mission

The tenth mission sends Rill down the Hart Road and into the Glasswood, where a small company of high elves has closed the wood around a ring of old standing stones. The mission plays from start to finish, but the elves in it are borrowed and recoloured sprites, their camp is made of stand-in buildings, and the briefing opens on a placeholder picture. This week the project started replacing all of it.

Nothing below is in the game yet. These are candidates, made so that the choice can happen by looking rather than by describing. Each sheet puts the candidates beside art that has already been accepted, at the size the player will see, on the same grass tile the game uses. A candidate that looks good alone and wrong next to a dwarf is a wrong candidate.

Three elves

The style bible gives the high elves one rule above the others: they are the tallest and slimmest people on the map. The mission's design adds a second: this is a small, practical expedition, so field gear, not court finery. And their cloth has to sit in the team-colour slots, so the same sprite recolours for whichever player owns it.

The Elf Archer candidates, south and south-east, beside the accepted dwarven Guard, Bowman and Shieldguard. A: hooded, with a tall pale longbow held upright. B: bare-headed with a blue headband, bow held low. C: arrow nocked across the body.

The recommendation for the Archer is A. It has the longest silhouette, and the bow still reads as a bow at game size. B carries the most team colour but its bow looks short; C is the busiest of the three, and its teal scarf partly escapes the team colouring.

The Elf Guardian candidates. A: leaf-bladed spear, round wooden shield, steel half-helm. B: curved blade and tall kite shield. C: a broad glaive and a buckler.

The Guardian is the elves' melee unit, so it needs a polearm or blade and a light shield. A reads most clearly as a spear fighter. B is the tallest and slimmest, but its shield carries a small gold emblem, and the project's art has no logos. C's blade is broad enough to read as a halberd.

The Elf Mystic candidates. A: pale grey layered robe, hood up, a staff topped with a small frosted-glass bead. B: bare head, sage coat, an open ring-headed staff. C: dark grey-green cloak and a slim glass-shard staff.

The Mystic is the caster, with one firm constraint: no fire. Candidate A's bead is frosted glass and deliberately does not glow, which ties it to the look of the stones in the ring. C shows almost no team colour, which matters more than it seems: in a fight, the player has to tell whose mystic it is.

A stone and a tent

The two elven buildings went through the project's own building pipeline rather than the unit generator, the same route the dwarven and human buildings took.

Warding Stone candidates on their 2 x 2 footprint, beside existing buildings. A: a tapering monolith on a round footing. B: a tall rounded stone on a two-step plinth. C: a slim obelisk with a banner on a crossbar.

All three Warding Stones came out greyer than intended. The pipeline snaps colours to the palette of the existing buildings, and that palette has no frost-white in it. That is a finding, not a failure: whichever stone is picked will get its own palette in production. The recommendation is B, the rounded stone on its plinth.

Pavilion candidates on their 4 x 3 footprint, beside the Human Barracks, Human Farm and Dwarf Guard Tower. A: a long ridge tent, open at the front. B: a hip-roofed canvas with tied-back curtains. C: a peaked canvas with a lean-to awning.

For the Pavilion, the brief was a plain field tent. B, with its curtains and valance, is the closest to finery and the furthest from the brief. A is the plainest and the recommendation.

The Envoy

The elves' leader in this mission is Ysarel, the Envoy, who states the company's position once, in the scene, before any fighting. Her portrait has to sit beside the accepted portraits without looking like it came from a different game.

Ysarel candidates beside the accepted portraits of Fenna and Yenna. A: grey-silver braid, high-collared sage coat. B: long dark hair, grey cloak. C: short pale hair, hood back, a wound scarf.

These are neutral takes; the accepted portraits got a dramatic lighting pass afterwards, and the pick will get the same. Candidate B is a useful example of why candidates are reviewed against the design and not only for looks: it was drawn as a man, and the mission's text already refers to the Envoy as "her".

The briefing picture

Every mission opens on an illustrated still. The Glasswood's brief lists what must be in the frame (the frosted clearing, the ring of pale stones, a plain pavilion, a few slender elves with unstrung bows, the road crossing a line of cords) and what must not (fighting, flames, magic, text).

Four candidates for the M10 briefing still, shown at twice their in-game size.

The recommendation is the first: low behind Rill, hammer on his shoulder, with the cords, the ring and three elves all clear. It shows the mission's whole question at a glance, which is a dwarf with a hammer standing at a line he has not yet decided to cross.

What happens next

Each generator ran against a fixed budget, and every candidate has a record of how it was made. None of it is accepted. The picks decide which designs go into full production: eight facing directions, walk, attack and death animations for each unit, with a checkpoint partway through for review. Until then, the Glasswood keeps its stand-ins.