The Chronicles of Spellborn official site has been updated with another edition of their weekly developer diary series which focuses on the artistic development of the game.

This week I'm going to write a bit about the first phase of the Art production pipeline. I will try to give you a bit insight in how we translate a design provided by the Gamedesign department into final concept art.

The Art production pipeline basically starts with a document that we call an FD, which stands for Functional Design. It's written by the gamedesigners and it contains lore, background information, motivation, design specifications, quest and/or game assets etc etc. It gives us their brilliant vision on the matter. It is in essence a manual with the details how it should be build. It's the blueprint. We think more of it as... a guideline.

The most (arguably the only) interesting part of FD's are the sketches of the layouts and/or visual references. This is where Gamedesigners go creative. This is also where it gets nasty. This is the reason why we hire concept artists.

Read the full developer diary here.