It’s been almost a month to the day since Orcs Must Die! hit XBLA receiving rave reviews all round and fans of the game will be interested to hear that Art Director at Robot Entertainment, David Kubalak, recently posted an insider’s view of the visual development processes used. In the post he reveals how they set out on a challenge to create a budget arcade style game without holding back on production values.

“we knew it would be based around a variety of enemies and monster types, and we wanted to keep them pretty recognizable, so we stuck with ogres, orcs, goblins, and kobolds”

Kubalak posts some interesting concept art of monsters and trap ideas and shows the transition from an originally more serious style to the humorous version we know and love. He also hints that our favourite War Mage may have been loosely based on a young Bruce Campbell or Kurt Russell:

“The tone of the game was not taking itself too seriously, and we found a lot of inspiration for our main character from movies like Army of Darkness and Big Trouble in Little China. I think that we did a great job of making our War Mage character come to life”


Kubalak also discusses how they didn’t want to scrimp on the smaller details, adding the headshot and kill streak notifications to give the game a more arcade feel and how they spend a bit of extra time on load screens and portrait cards to improve the overall polish of the game. It certainly worked. You can read the full post over at CGHUB and check out our review of Orcs Must Die! here. If you’ve already got the game be sure to read over our in-depth guide.

Source: CGHUB