Jan Krocak - Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream

Category
Game Art

One of the great things about working at River End Games was that you never knew which discipline you were going to dive into next. With such a small team it was uncommon to rely only on your existing skills and knowledge. There was always so much to learn, and the more open you were to that approach the more you truly enjoyed the process. This, of course, came with a lot of trust from the direction and I always appreciated that.

I joined River End Games thanks to its creative director Anders Hejdenberg shortly after the cancellation of the project I was working on at Jumpship. At the time the team was finishing the studio’s debut game Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream and all available hands were needed.

The environments field was already occupied and well handled so aside from creating various supporting assets I was tasked with exploring areas that were quite new to all of us — VFX and destruction. Although Houdini was already my favourite tool, I had never used it for this discipline before so I found it really refreshing to learn more about the topic — and, of course, to break and blow things up.

Another interesting task was creating the main menu. Houdini played a major role once again, allowing me to create and animate the decorative elements in a more non-destructive, procedural way.

Near the end of production I finally got the chance to work on one of the environments with the shelter which was a really nice experience, especially thanks to all the polished assets the team had put together over the years.