I don't consider myself a very good 3D modeler. I've dabbled with Blender 3D on and off over the last couple of years, but I rarely finished anything because I just couldn't get the design right, or the lighting was wrong, or the work-in-progress was just plain unsatisfying.

With this in mind, imagine my surprise when I decided to have a go at creating a 3D model of the Great Hall. The end result was completely out of character for my normal work. Somehow I got the model right and the scene right. Sure, it isn't high art and it's a pretty generic scene, but it looks good.

Keepers only really needs one character model, so that was my next task. I loaded 2D pixel image I drew for the prototype, added a plane and started extruding. Some hours later, Igor was born and he looks pretty good. Again, he's a bit generic and lacking detail, but he looks like a complete character, and I created him from a 48 pixel high side view that I drew in about 1 minute just to use in the prototype. Somehow I was able to make him 3D just from the low resolution 2D side image and do it on the first attempt.

These two successes left me feeling emboldened, so I decided that next, I would tackle what would be the most difficult graphics in the game: the title screen.

I had in mind an image of the Transylvanian mountains, with a castle in the center of the scene and a path leading to it. So I opened up Blender, and without even attempting to sketch on paper, I created the Igor's Boss' Home.

And yet again, I surprised myself by actually being happy with my work. Happy, and it's not even finished as the only things that are textured in that scene are the Moon and the mailbox. Everything else is either the default grey/white colour that Blender gives new objects, or the dark grey which I assigned to the mountains. Despite that, it still looks good. Good enough that it's OK at the resolution of the Ares (480x272), but at the size of the render above, the castle and road really need a bit of texture to stop them looking so plasticy.

How did I do it?

The Great Hall and the Castle, these are both pretty simple models, yet, in the past, I've created much more complex models that ranged between bland and awful in the final render.

I finally realised that what sets these images apart from my previous efforts is the lighting. In the castle scene, there's actually six lights:

• One dim blue light for the moonlight on the mountains
• A dim blue light on the left of the camera to give the castle some detail in the shadows.
• A bright blue light on the right to intensify the moonlight on the foreground
• Three orange lights, two in each of the nearest castle turrets and one in the courtyard.

Moving on

The Castle scene still needs some work, I'd really like to texture it for instance, and I need to move the stuff around in the foreground a bit to balance it out more, but that's the beauty of 3D, since anything and everything can be moved around as needed.

The next stage of the Keepers project is to create the graphic blocks that are used in the scrolling sections, and once that's done, that'll probably be the most difficult 3D stuff out of the way, so it'll be back to coding.