Postmortem: Sacrada Guardians

[Gil]

This is all from an old project of mine. I recently got permission from the owner (Elder Prince over at Blossomsoft.com) to show these off, as the project is cancelled. The project was a collaboration between me, Sonic_Reaper, DayDream, Xavier Dang (OCRemix), Min "Keiiii" Kwon (Haru-Sari.com) and Elder Prince (Eternal Eden). This was supposed to come out for Nintendo Gameboy Advance under the name Western Lords. It was a wild west kind of story based on an old cartoon series called "The Mysterious Cities of Gold".

Here's the lovely concept art I had to work with to create the sprites:

http://www.game-designer.org/projects/blossomsoft/WL/concept/Bandanna.jpg
http://www.game-designer.org/projects/blossomsoft/WL/concept/Zilia.jpg
http://www.game-designer.org/projects/blossomsoft/WL/concept/Anuk.jpg
http://www.game-designer.org/projects/blossomsoft/WL/concept/Willem.jpg[/img]

These concepts were put into sprite form by a guy named Adam, then perfected by Daydream. I came on board afterwards (together with Sonic_Reaper, who did enemies) and started animating them. All I had was very rough pixels, so from here on out, 98% of the work is mine. I did a whole series of animations, but not all of them are complete (only the horizontal walk animation of Zilia is done). These are very high in saturation, because the Gameboy Advance required this. Some of the sprites look too busy as a result though (Anuk). This was a few years ago, I would fare better now of course.

Zilia:


Anuk:


Bandanna:


After this the name was changed to Sacrada Guardians and the decision made to start developing it for the upcoming Nintendo DS. This might have been the reason the project was never finished, as we had to redo most art assets. I proposed the following new art style (based on the new concept art), but it was rejected through a fan poll:






Since the new concept was rejected, I was asked to redo the originals in the new size. Zilia's sprite was updated to fit the Zilia concept art (the originals were done based on older concepts). This is the result:

Zilia, Willem, Bandanna, Anuk


As you can see, there was still some work left on the back sprites (Anuk's anatomy was dreadful). After that though, the project was put on hiatus. We worked on a project called Oracle. We finished it (same team as Western Lords, minus Daydream), but the publisher never released it. You can read the postmortem here:

http://www.blossomsoft.com/gamezopher/?p=4491

I left the company after that. Elder tried to do another rendition of Sacrada Guardians, a prequel called Western Lords (after the original title), but it was put on hiatus again. After that he started to create games on his own and released the very successful Eternal Eden, which you can buy on the Blossomsoft site (I recommend it highly). Dorian Tokici (Sonic_Reaper) did some of the sprite work in the game.

So, that's the history of my work for Blossomsoft, I hope you all had fun reading this.

[Dr D]

Looks like someone used a little too much CT reference for their animations. Don't know how that would have fared if it was published.

Personally, I would have voted for the longer-legs style that you proposed, more readable, and easier on the eyes.

[Mush]

Long leg set is infinitely better than the CT set. It's a shame they were gone to waste.

[Jakten]

This was a cool read, Its a shame it never came to fruition though.
I also am surprised that people voted out your longer style. It's really nice looking and would have been a lot more refreshing to look at than the typical RPG shaped guys.
I really like the new Zilia sprite as well.

[Gil]

People interested in seeing more of the wonderful tile work (Elder Prince) or the cutscenes (Min Kwon) can check out the old GameSpot page (lossy to prevent stealing):

http://www.gamespot.com/ds/rpg/westernlords/


About the Chrono Trigger thing: I'm a huge Chrono Trigger fan, so that might have seeped in, but I didn't really reference CT for animations, so it's still refreshing. I'm pretty sure that legally it's so far removed that you couldn't even argue derivative. The influence is visible of course. Those are also things we had to consider when creating the game, you always have to be careful about lawsuits.

Fun fact: our musician Xavier Dang was also one of the musicians behind the old Chrono Resurrection project.