e, Tibia's art team, were responsible for designing the visual style and overall feel of the new monk vocation in collaboration with product management and the content team. Join us as we share our approach and the creative challenges we faced while introducing a new vocation to Tibia.

Character Design 

The vision for the monk's appearance evolved throughout the development process. In the beginning, our content team envisioned a species with tiger features for the monk NPCs. But given the fact that we already have a similar race in Tibia, the weretigers, it would have been confusing and also difficult to create a clearly distinguishable new humanoid tiger race. As a result, we developed additional concepts and drafts to steer the monk's appearance in a new direction.

The monk should be human but with very specific features and conditions. Since the monk is a martial artist, we aimed to depict the body as a primary weapon. So we decided on less and quite simple clothes and a focus on a muscular upper body. One more core criterion for the monk's human appearance was that the player outfit should strongly resemble the NPCs. The player should blend perfectly into the monastic order and become a part of it.

The monk NPCs, who teach the ways of the monk, have attained a higher level of enlightenment. To represent their magical and spiritual strength, energy flows through their bodies, manifesting as glowing symbols on their skin and light shining from their eyes. Giving them a darker skin tone enhances the contrast and amplifies the visibility of these glowing elements.

Furthermore, there are three important elements in the teachings of the monk: harmony, enlightenment, and power. In many cultures, we find the concept that strength is symbolised by the hair. Depending on their rank, the monks have progressively longer hair, which gives them a unique look that blends aspects of a warrior and a guru.

Avatar and Familiars 

As we designed the familiars for the monk, we drew inspiration from the environment surrounding the monk to ensure that the designs were contextually appropriate. There is a mythical story called "The Hungry Monk and the Guiding Moth" that is told in the Tibian book "Warrior Monk Pilgrims". We used it as a reference for the moth design. As the alternative design, we chose a bipedal elephant with four arms. The elephant is an animal that we have not utilised in Tibia that often, so far. Giving it a humanoid form and fabric clothing felt fitting. The emphasis on the four arms can be representative for the combat prowess of the monk, who is primarily using hands when fighting.

Having a design based on a tiger was floated around very soon when we talked about this vocation, so picking this up for the avatar of the monk seemed like a great choice. We wanted an anthropomorphical tiger design that embodies physical power and speed, which should show in the athletic physique. Merely having claws and hand-to-hand prowess as a weapon also appealed to us. Just like the monk, they stand as their own weapon. Furthermore, the glowing tattoos and glyph show spirituality and connection to the essence of totality on an ethereal level. 

The Temple and its Surroundings 

Based on this overarching philosophy of the principle of totality, we decided to use a circle as the main symbol. As mentioned above, this totality in turn is comprised of power, enlightenment, and harmony. These are represented by the triangle, which we often show within the circle. We tried to implement this symbolism in much of the decoration and structure, both architecturally and, if possible, also in the natural environment that is curated by the monks.

Some real-life inspiration from far eastern Asian culture seemed obvious, since you always have to meet certain expected archetypes, not just for the character designs but also for the surroundings. Shaolin, Tibetan, or Hindu elements come to mind first. In the example below, you can see how we tried to give this a certain unique twist for Tibia. The more rounded rooftops combined with the above-mentioned symbolisms and familiar archetypical monk-related visual cues gave us a mix that feels familiar but also incorporates these new ideas and integrates well with Tibia.

We wanted a very earthy and brown-orange colour palette for a lot for the temple asset set in general. Below are some early concepts with floor and column designs, as well as some walls that explore heavily detailed and ornamented sections as opposed to more plain walls, that were later also part of the tileset.

Some new statues and small shrines as well as light sources would provide the content team with some additional new building blocks for this area.

Item Design

Creating a new vocation also came with the challenge to create new weapon classes and armor which often had to be integrated into existing sets. New weapon types were, for example, nunchakus, sai forks, claw gauntlets, katars, or battle staffs. From simple training weapons to animated best-in-slot items in the Sanguine or Soul sets, the content team had quite a long wish list we had to work through. A lot of equipment sets from recent years now needed to be expanded by monk weapons with similar design elements.

This prompted questions such as: How do we differentiate new weapon types like sai forks or katars from existing daggers and swords? In this case we changed the orientation of the item. While swords generally are pointing towards the upper left corner, the sai forks and katars are positioned from the upper right to the lower left corner. A new dual-wielding feature was also introduced, and pointing to the lower left corner looks like the natural holding position when the sais and gloves are mirrored in the weapon hand slots of the inventory.

New types of weapons and armor and adding monk items to existing sets

Artwork 

For the promotional monk artwork, we had two artists from our team working on that piece. We used this opportunity to bounce ideas between those artists, as both worked on thumbnails for the first draft. Once we had an overall direction, the artwork was passed back and forth until the idea was finalised. The painting would focus on the upcoming monk class but carry an air of mystery to foster interest and curiosity in the viewer upon revelation. When rendering the artwork, one artist prioritised working on the foreground while the other worked primarily on the background. It was a total blast!

First thumbnailing phase

Trying to bring ideas together

Final sketch before the rendering process

For this special artwork, we decided to do a day and night shot for the final render

Changes in the User Interface 

Adding new elements to Tibia's UI is often a challenging task. New features need to be integrated seamlessly into existing systems, without breaking any of the legacy functions and adhering to the style rules of the established UI. The first step was to familiarise ourselves with the new gameplay mechanics the monk requires. We have internal design documents written by our product management that outline what needs to be changed in the client's UI. We begin with screenshots of the current UI as our foundation, tweaking elements gradually to integrate new UI features. Typically, this involves several rounds of iteration.

We started by focusing on the new features of building harmony and displaying the virtue state. We needed to integrate it into three different areas - the customisable status bars, the arc-style HUD, and the bar-style HUD that appears around the character sprite. All the elements must be clearly identifiable as serving the same function, yet they also need to be adapted to match the existing style of each component.

The design options for HUD elements are quite limited. With the arc-style HUD in particular, we felt it was crucial for the new elements not to occupy too much space on the game window. Ultimately, we chose a design that splits the health bar in the middle to display the harmony stack.

The design on the right picture above was chosen because for us, it was the best readable and space-efficient solution at the same time

When designing the customisable status bar, we tried various arrangements of the elements but ultimately went with circular shapes for everything. The original designs were more similar to LED lights which felt a bit too modern. In the end, the harmony points ended up as small gongs, and virtue is being visualised by our already established monk symbol.

Early iterations of the customisable status bar, with the final design at the bottom

Another prominent UI element that had to be adjusted was the Wheel of Destiny, which contains depictions of all the vocations on each quadrant. The original design was meant to rotate, displaying the player's vocation on top. Together with the product management, we decided to waive this gimmick and instead create individual wheels for each vocation to provide the clearest possible view for players.

That is a glimpse into our daily artistic endeavours. We hope this article provided a solid overview of how we tackle a massive project like this and the elements that must be considered from an artistic perspective to successfully integrate a new vocation into Tibia.

Play with imagination!
Your Tibia Artists