Today, we’re looking at the inside of Atalatha, specifically at the great coliseum therein.  This coliseum, owned and operated by Allan Mayheyre, has always been a very popular place for people to visit, but in recent times, with the advent of TowerSphere, it has become even more important to the culture of the city, and indeed, much of the world at this point.  Since the coliseum was the place that the game was first unveiled, we knew that we wanted to put on a focus on that, and we recruited Wern, who was already working on the characters who would fight within its walls, to bring it to life.  You can see from the original sketch that we went with a round building, though it could quite possibly be elongated.  For our purposes, the round version works fine.  We also had a tremendous statue beside the entrance, though in its initial presentation, it sort of looked a bit like a spartan warrior.

Our next iteration of the image adjusts some things, giving a much grander scope of the city and the walls along its border.  It brings us all the way to the mountains in the distance, though we determined that they needed to be a little bit farther away.  We also had the statue changed to better reflect the owner of the coliseum.  A young Allan Mayheyre is presented there, and gives us our first ever glimpse of what he might have looked like when he was known for some of his greatest exploits in heroism.

We changed a few things in the next iteration, but the most noticeable one was stretching how far the mountains moved into the distance.  Our knight has a change in footwear as well.

We added some distant buildings in Atalatha, trying to do our best to make sure that people know that the city is humongous.  While there are certainly buildings closer to the coliseum, they should stretch on for quite some distance.  Wern captured this expertly.

Now, that about wraps us up for today, but we have more concept pieces for TowerSphere arenas that we are going to be looking at in the future.  Keep your eyes peeled for those, and plenty of our other art Wednesday releases!

The post Concept Art – Atalatha Arena appeared first on Tellest.

As Atalatha was the inception of this idea, it stands to reason that Atalatha would be the first place to really embrace it and have a team.  We’ll be looking at the arena that their matches take place in, as well as seeing our first look at their top five players in the Atalatha Firebirds.

Below, you’ll see the initial sketch that Wern provided for us.  It was important to nail down three things: the towers, the arena, and what exists outside.  You’ll notice that there are towering statues on the outside edge of the arena, and that is because we wanted to have the heroes of Atalatha and Raleigh embodied and memorialized

We briefly lost the towers when we were designing the look of the arena a little further.  You can also see we dialed back the number of statues outside.  Where’d the towers go?  Well, typically speaking, the towers are themselves magical, being constructed on the day of the event.  Because the towers can be placed in a zone on a team’s side, it needs to have a bit more flexibility in the way that it is “built”, so to speak.

For the sake of visual appeal, we’ve kept the towers in an established order.  You can see that they’re pretty standard in their appearance (although one thing we did need to work on was a proper entryway into the towers—you can’t play without an entrance).  Wern also touched up the environment both inside and outside the arena.

Here we’ve got our doorways in the towers.

And here, we have another quintessential part of the towers: the flags.  The flags are magically enchanted to react to the other very important part of the game, the sphere.  When the sphere passes through the tower, the flag atop it will change to the color of the sphere, represented by which player holds it.  Atalatha’s team flag is often blue, because of their team logo, and the color of their city’s sigil.

Here in our final piece, you can see the top five players of the Atalatha Firebirds.  From left to right, we have Harun Jadar, Luca Kreegan, David Garus, Degrad “Dirk” Camdy, and Venathryn of the Whisperwind Elves.  They’re a very competent team, and Atalatha is lucky for not only having been the place where TowerSphere was born, but by having a great set of contenders who are eager to keep the championship in their city.

That’s all for today, but at the time of this writing, we have three other teams and their arenas which we’ll be showing off in the months to come, so keep your eyes peeled!

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