Behind the art of DestinyQuest Infinite

By DeviantArt standards, I am an Old Fart: I’ve been part of the online artist community for 9 years. If you’re not familiar with DA, it’s like a Tumblr for aspiring artists, a social media for people who like to draw, take photos, or otherwise express themselves creatively.

The quality on DA ranges from disturbingly detailed large-chested women, to doodles on junior high school notebooks. But among the soup of different skillsets, there are some truly amazing artists. Over the years I’ve discovered a handful of artists who I’ve grown to revere for both their skill and personality.

And then it turned out I was working with one of them. I remember thinking the style for the awesome DestinyQuest Infinite monster art looked familiar. I admit I let out a little squeal when I realized that the artist was one of my DA idols, Marissa Rivera, aka PearlPhoenix.

A snippet of PearlPhoenix’s incredible DeviantArt gallery.

In fact, thanks to DQI I’ve been working closely with some great artists. With such a tiny team you end up having to outsource a lot of the work to freelancers. We usually turn to freelance congregating services like oDesk or eLance, where we can pick whoever seems like the best fit for us.

Sometimes that fit turns out to be perfect like in the case of Michael Angelo Broñola, our trailer artist. We are probably not the most fun people to work with for freelancers, since we do all the things that are listed on those “things that drive freelancers crazy” lists. We rarely know what the finished product should look like aside from a vague idea, and as the project develops we get a better understand that it is “not what you’re doing.”

That is, seeing something creative take shape in someone else’s hands helps us understand what we want the final image (or video, or website..) to look like, and it doesn’t always align with what’s already been completed. There’s a lot of back and forth, first fixing general glaring issues, and then turning to fine tuning the tiniest details.

Angelo took everything like a trooper, providing every change we requested quickly and with a genuine smile. He even lent us his voice for the opening of the trailer. I actually still chat with him once in a while about what he’s up to (he’s gone on to make the logo for 3D Realms – the studio behind the Duke Nukem games – and uses our trailer as the centerpiece of his portfolio!).

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to find a good match through any of the websites we use to find freelancers. I noticed at one point that for over a month Chris and some freelancer were going back and forth on one icon from the DQI Inventory. ONE icon. Chris tried changing artists, to no avail. This was one of the most concrete tasks we had, too – here’s an image. Make an image just like this one but much smaller. Still, it just wasn’t working out with our freelancers.

So I ended up back on DeviantArt. Have you ever seen well-made pixel art? It’s incredible how detailed some artists can be in a tiny 25 x 25 pixel square – and many of these artists are just high school or college students who try to make a tiny bit of money with their art. Within a day I had someone to make our icons, and they were completed by the end of the week. I went in and retouched the icons to make them less pixelly (and “too smooth” apparently, but it’s a good enough compromise!) and our new icons were done.

We’re almost done with all the art for the game (or at least Act 1), but I’m sure there will be more things to do once that’s over. I’m looking forward to seeing who else we end up working with!

Yuliya

Yuliya handles marketing and writing at QuestForge, and is the self-appointed chief of keeping Chris sane (despite Chris's insistence that he is the sane one).