Via Starwars.com:
THE GIFTED ARTIST WALKS STARWARS.COM THROUGH THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING A BRAND NEW PLANET FOR THE HIT GAME.
At this point, Doug Chiang is a Star Wars legend. Now Lucasfilm’s VP and executive creative director, he served as design director on both The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, was the concept artist for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and is currently the co-production designer on Rogue One. In other words, he has helped shape the visual identity of Star Wars in the modern era like few others, and that includes the new Star Wars Battlefront video game. Chiang advised on the game’s art direction, guiding developer DICE’s designs to be authentically Star Wars — especially important considering the game features the first real appearance of Sullust, a planet of molten rock, lava flows, and white smoke, only mentioned briefly in Return of the Jedi. StarWars.com caught up with Chiang to talk specifically about the creation of Sullust, along with other aspects of bringing Star Wars worlds to next-gen consoles.
StarWars.com: From what I understand, you had done visual exploration on Sullust prior to Battlefront.
Doug Chiang: Yeah. So on Sullust, we did a little bit of development because we weren’t sure if it was going to end up in Episode VII. Early on in Episode VII, we were just doing blue-sky design prior to an actual outline and script. We were exploring a lot of different planets, all from the canon of Star Wars. Sullust was one of those planets that hadn’t been explored before in the films, and we thought it might be interesting to kind of develop that a little bit and see what we could do with it.
At that time, we hadn’t really evolved the planet design in terms of the aesthetic yet. So we were really just trying to put down some ideas to spark conversations. When we started working on Battlefront, it was more of the same thing. At that time, Sullust was identified as a potential planet for the game, and the team at DICE started to do some development art. We quickly honed in on what the look and the feel should be.
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