Building Rome: The art of ROME: Total War on iPad
Rome wasn’t built in a day – and for iPad it took a while. Here we describe our journey in a series of five enlightening dev diaries, from our first experiments with touch controls right through to completing the full and glorious experience of ROME: Total War on iPad.
We don’t normally get to redo artwork for our games, so we were very excited when the opportunity came along with ROME: Total War for iPad. We worked with a team of talented artists, some of whom had provided art for Creative Assembly on other Total War games.
The art for ROME: Total War has always been something special, but the UI was built in 2004 for lower-resolution screens, and didn't transfer fantastically to the Retina screen of the iPad.
So we spruced it up, preserving the original look while perfecting it for the greatly increased screen res.
The artists painstakingly repainted over 1400 icons, cards and map images at four times their size. They even drew some from scratch. We then added the new art to the game for a super-sharp finish.
While we’re on the subject of gorgeous aesthetics, we hope you’ve admired the opening, prologue and faction introduction cutscenes on your iPad. We rerecorded them from 4K Mac displays to achieve the most spectacular quality possible.
ROME: Total War is now available for iPad on the App Store. Advance to the minisite for videos, screenshots, and tips on building and ruling your empire.
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