Underwater Cities - development: Graphics

As we said in Editorial, we decided to public constantly Underwater Cities producing process and its development. Reason for this is that we would like to promote it as a future product naturally and at the same time we want to show our fans what should we manage during production of Eurogame. Next reason is that we hope you will help us with solving our dilemas and problems in some aspects of the game. We really appreciate help of our boardgame fans so our idea is to choose before Spiel´18 in Essen the most active contributors from which we allot three who will get a free copy of Underwater Cities.

Question 1 – How should we illustrate sea bottom ?? Wonderful sea from Dreamland or not??:

Theme of our game takes place in future and players are project managers for building underwater areas, where could live part of our population. Every player has his own plan of underwater area, which presents sea bottom. On this plan players build domes (cities), tunnels and devices as laboratories, desalination plants and farms.

The question is….How to illustrate this underwater bottom…?

First idea was: We let to illustrate water, there will be some waves, fish and nice blue sea.

First illustrator´s comment: OK, but players will build their cities right on the sea surface, it could look strange.

Our idea: So we could illustrate seabed, we build cities right on the sea bottom, we could illustrate there also some beautiful colourful corals, fish, seahorses and other beautiful „sea-stuff“.

Then another comment: Domes which are built by players are so big, if we would like to keep size ratio of all the things there, corals and seahorses can´t be visible enough because of its real size.

Comment of Ecologist: We can´t build domes on preserved corals!

Idea: Ok, we could try something like a map of seabed area taken as a photo from a high altitude – something like remote sensing picture. Seabed could be visible and players could build on the sea bottom.

Our great illustrator has made a sketch of underwater bottom. We added contours for building device necessary for imaging how it all works together and can´t wait the moment we test it with our friends.

Comments from next testing:

„Oops, why do you call it Underwater Cities and build domes on the Moon surface plan?“

Oh, yeah, it isn´t the right way of illustrating it…

Next ideas follow:

We can try to forgot a perspective a little bit and add some corals, it should look like a sea. In addition three corners of the underwater plan should be above sea level , there should be land and beach or some transition to the sea.

Dialog with the illustrator follows: If I illustrate it this way, we are building on the sea-surface again

Yep, we know, you are true. So what can we do with that…..? We can try view to the cities in the corners of the plan, transition to the water and the rest as a bottom with corals. However we must accept that this is future underwater area in future World. Why wouldn´t be possible the situation that project manager lies on a mat on the sea – surface with left eye above the sea level and look at the city and the right eye having under sea level and if it is possible also to hold his telescope. With this telescope he could see also corals around

When we accept this unreal idea, we illustrate very nice picture of underwater building area which will look as a sea bottom and everything what belongs to it and not as a Moon surface picture.

We are adding 4 proposals of visual look of our underwater plans. We are interested in your opinion to these proposals. What do you think about possible unreal perspective of these pictures? Is it OK? And what about color of it?

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Underwater Cities