The Making of It Takes Two to Tangle (Digital Art)
Although this is just an early piece of KQ fanart, the idea of Oppi creating Rosella's wedding ring from of a piece of the diamond he got from her in KQ7 made it into the game.
(You can tell this is an old piece since it was created before I decided that Edgar's eyes should be brown in the KQ7 "version" of him, rather than blue, as they are in his KQ4 version).
Colored versions of some of the early icons.
Alexander's outfits. Aside from removing the glittery texture, the outfit in the center remained mostly unchanged from its creation to the final game. I recreated it in fanart on more than one occasion, and it also originally had a blue gem similar to the one on Cassima's headdress worn as a pendant (seen below, in this picture I did of Alexander for Sierra Planet's character profiles page).
Old versions of Aubrey's clothing.
A height chart I created for the main characters. To make it as accurate as possible, I took screenshots of the closeups of the characters as they appeared in KQ5 and KQ7, lined them up vertically, drew horizontal lines along the tops of their heads to determine how tall they should be in relation to each other, then created a lineup based on those measurements.
Since KQ7's characters have more pastel coloration than the more realistic characters in KQ5 and KQ6, I tried adjusting screenshots of Valanice and Rosella until they had roughly the same colors as they were in KQ5 and KQ6, then adjusted the coloring of the other KQ7 characters using the same settings, then used similar colors for them in It Takes Two Two Tangle (and yes, I changed Valanice's hair color back to red).
Some of the many 3D models I used for rotoscoping the characters. For some reason, Rosella's hair freaked out while I was working on her model.
I didn't always use the same hair or clothing color in my rotoscoping models. The wiseman's hair model was imported with a plain white texture, and while I was working on him, I realized that he looked unsettlingly close to Jack Frost in Dreamworks' Rise of the Guardians.
An early rendition of a scene from the cut Dark Etheria sequence.
A crude sketch of the island Alexander is walking on during his dream in the intro.
Renders from Edgar's half of the intro when it started with him alone in one of Etheria's gardens. It was meant to start on a closeup of two dragonettes, which then fly off, with the camera zooming in as Edgar walks into frame.
A rough sketch of the final version of Edgar's half of the intro.
The throne room of the Castle of the Crown. This is the location that Cassima originally vanished from, and Alexander was going to be studying her locket from his throne.
A later version of Cassima's half of the intro.
An unfinished version of Alexander and Cassima's bedroom, with the low-poly human models used to make sure each element of the scene (i.e., the bed, the table, the chair, etc.) is scaled accurately.
Profiles of Edgar and Cassima, possibly for an early version of the Choose Your Path screen.
A placeholder graphic for the Choose Your Path screen.
The icon bar with placeholder graphics.
A rough storyboard of the Edge of the World (where Cassima and Edgar initially encountered each other).
Early versions of Crispin's house.
An early version of Ashni's house.
The original toy horse (unresized). It was originally plain wood, but since I wanted this to be a horse that the toymaker's son was truly proud of, I gave it a colorful paint job.
An early version of the Wiseman's hut.
The crystal dragon's model (2018).
A very rough digital sketch of Derek's puzzle box.
Rough, incomplete maps of an early version of the first three chapters.
Old and new renders of Tamir.
A storyboard of Edgar ascending the Impossible Mountains and eventually finding the temple (passing through a "time window" that sends him into the past on the way).
The oasis experienced a massive overhaul. There used to be two shops instead of one, and only two exterior scenes. This second shop was a textile shop with a very short, ornery man as its keeper. Cassima ends up getting trapped inside this shop when once one of Shadrack's agents appears outside the window. She then has to escape by using a convoluted and complicated series of puzzles, escaping through a trapdoor that leads to the back of the shop. This was where she originally met Bluebeard, who forces her to return to his castle with him.
Some sketches of the shopkeeper superimposed on the textile shop background (for scaling reference).
Early versions of the starting screens of the Isle of the Sacred Mountain and the Isle of Wonder.
A picture of Gabbro which I created for the game's novelization (which I published in 2006, back when I thought I'd never be able to make this project into a proper game).
Unfinished and early renders of Etheria, some with early character sprites added.
A screenshot of the model of the Aquila (2020).
A storyboard of Cassima's dream of Alexander while she is in the Impossible Mountains.
The same storyboard as above, only Cassima is now in Genesta's castle.
Cassima meeting with Genesta (along with screenshots from KQ4, for reference).
An early version of the physician's storeroom.
I put this mockup of the alchemy puzzle together quite a while ago, back when I was still using version 2 of AGS. The room's scripts still use the old naming conventions.
Various renders of Dark Etheria.
A map of the maze, with notes. The backgrounds may be old, but the layout is still mostly the same as it is in the final game (Edgar originally left the center room by a tunnel, rather than backtracking).
A color sheet for the griffins that Cassima was initially going to meet after she and Edgar escape the mob that chases them out of Quisquilious. Scintilla is the one that Cassima rescued from Bluebeard's castle.
A storyboard from the cut Dark Etheria section. When Cassima first leaves the main square of Quisquilious, she encounters a mysterious man at the crossroads, which prompts her to backtrack.
An unfinished digital sketch of the siren painting in Eurus' Den (the tavern in Quisquilious).
Even though this piece from ~2000 was created to be nothing more than a standalone piece of fanart/concept art, it's still very similar to the way Cassima enters the ocean in Kolyma.
Originally, Edgar was going to visit the Isle of the Mists, where he would disguise himself as a druid by changing his cloak into a robe, entering some of their houses before solving a riddle presented to him by the Arch-Druid involving matching runes to objects marked by them around the island.
Rough redesigns of Suhad.
Alexander was originally going to build a small device that opens a portal to reach Cassima. I got as far as creating a 3D model of it before I decided to change it to a series of chalk circles, runes and precious stones.
A rough storyboard of Alexander finding and using the locket.
After the important role that it plays in King's Quest V (and the sentimentality that Cassima must have for it, since it contains her parents' portraits) I decided to make it play an important role in this game as well.
Early and later Ooga Booga renders.
These are the final 3D renders of two of the screens in Ooga Booga. I did some serious tweaking to them in Photoshop to come up with what you see in the final game.
I originally designed the bat in Ooga Booga with yellow irises. I decided to change the eyes to all black to make it look a bit more menacing, so that players wouldn't feel quite as bad about scaring it away (and yes -- I flipped the bat upside down while I was animating it).
The 3D render of Ashni's castle which was the base for the final scene.
I briefly played with the idea of Edgar's bones glowing enough to be seen through his skin when he has to summon a huge amount of magic during the climax. While this idea never got used, Shadrack's nerves are visible when he summons his magic.
Early concepts of various types of magic to be seen in the game. I decided to make Edgar's magic match the kind he has in King's Quest 7.
An overhead map showing the placement of the characters in Chapter 5.
Shadrack concept art.
The entirety of Chapter 5 is set in a single 3D "set", where every piece of the set had to be strategically placed in order to make the entire sequence work. The camera is never pointed at a randomly selected background -- when Edgar and Cassima look where Shadrack appears, that is where the camera points for the background where Shadrack is shown. The trees, rocks etc. remain in the same spots throughout the scene, and the characters' positions in the scene also remain roughly consistant from background to background. I used several low-poly 3D models textured to look like the characters as references (which is what I did for most of the character animations throughout the game, just on a much grander scale).
Incomplete renders of the outro made between 2018 and 2019 (including a recreation of the KQ1SCI outro). Given how much the castle and its surroundings change in between games, I tried to create a mix of its appearance in KQ1AGI, KQ1SCI and 5, with a few additions to its surroundings to make Daventry look more like a thriving kingdom rather than an empty expanse of fields.
A brief slideshow comparing various backgrounds in the game before and after editing.
While some changes are pretty subtle, some backgrounds underwent drastic alterations and additions.
Cassima, Edgar and Scrimshaw -- a section from an ancient piece of art I did around Y2K for Sierra Planet's forum, the Crazy Comet Cafe.
Think of this as a really, really, really early teaser.
These renderings weren't made by me, but by Karen Soroe (around 2012). She created these scenes for me in Vue 3D, but since these renders were of a much higher quality than the ones I was making (and the game required many, many renders), she sent me the 3D models and textures of several scenes, and I was able to recreate them in Bryce.
