The firebeast is one of the more formidable monsters in the labyrinth stages of A Wizard's Odyssey.  As potential heroes quickly find out, it is invulnerable to fire-based attacks.  In fact, only water-based spells can stop the firebeast's relentless charges. 

The picture above shows progressive stages in the monster's design.  The leftmost rendering is a wireframe rendering, which shows how the firebeast's surface has been divided up into sets of triangles.  Every character in the game is first described as a set of triangles because modern graphics cards are very efficient at drawing them. 

The center rendering is a Gouraud-shaded solid rendering.  Gouraud shading is a very common way of drawing solid objects that somewhat hides the object's faceted representation (flat triangles).

The rightmost rendering is a textured rendering.  We have effectively glued artist-drawn images onto each of the triangles to give the firebeast more interesting details without introducing more triangles.

Once the firebeast model is fully textured, we load it up into a custom animator program to define various animation poses. 

This picture shows one frame in which the firebeast is taking a hit.  One of its leg components is translucent because we are editing that part in the animation editor.  After all the animation frames and inter-frame timings are set, we save all the data and load it into the game.  The game can then, based on the mood of the firebeast, choose some animation sequence to play and smoothly transition between the animation frames using a process called interpolation.

Here is an in-game scene where the firebeast has just finished a stomp; the stomp releases a shock-wave that propagates very quickly outward.  In response, the player has activated the fire-protection spell which can counter any fire-based attack. 

Hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at the firebeast's design!