Greetings, travelers! Today, we’re taking a very cool look at something that is near and dear to my heart. A while back now, I introduced TowerSphere to the world of Tellest. It’s an in-universe sport that we’ve given a brief story to explain, but it’s going to be a big part of the culture of the world going forward, and if I play my cards right—pun intended—it’ll start to invade our real workd as well.
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!
Michael DeAngelo
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