Firm recruits north artists to create ‘virtual’ army

A PIONEERING Black Isle video games company, which has released more than 40 titles in five years, is hoping for its greatest success yet, thanks to painstaking efforts from a team of volunteer artists.

Fortrose-based HexWar, which owns the rights to produce computer versions of 500 military board games, drafted an army of relatives, friends and even local school-children to help paint, photograph and digitally edit hundreds of action figurines for use as graphics in Field of Glory.

The result is an impressive and polished strategy game that betrays little of its low-budget production, similar in appearance to hit titles Age of Empires and the Civilization series.

HexWar founder Keith Martin-Smith believes the game's visceral design will help the company to break out of what he terms an ultra-niche market populated by stark two-dimensional games aimed at strategy fans using detailed rule books to help determine their tactics.

He said: “Presentation is everything to grab people's attention. We realised that, without these sorts of graphics, we weren't going to reach a bigger audience.

“There's something about Field of Glory that makes it a lot more popular. Typically, the rule books for these games sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies. Field of Glory has sold 200,000 copies in 18 months.” With only one computer artist on the game's development team, the task of designing hundreds of unique 3D characters was too great, so it was decided to buy model soldiers which would then be painted and photographed.

What started as a family effort from niece Rebekah, wife Carola and her parents, soon expanded to include members of the Inverness War Games Club and students from Fortrose Academy. Once the models had been painted they were photographed from 12 angles to create the in-game illusion of 3D. Finally all of the 4,236 photographs had to be individually edited and each set of 12 was then automatically scaled and aligned by custom software.