To give an example: we worked together to define the list of characters we'd want to appear in the city, and also to work out how often they should appear. The whole thing has very much been a collaboration with Transworld and Terry. How did you go about planning all the new audio and video - did you have a wishlist of what you wanted to include? It was worth the effort the way characters walk behind buildings really makes the illustration come to life. So, we traced every single one of them (using a Cintiq monitor tablet and stylus), and extracted them as overlaid image masks.

Because the map is hand-painted, there's no quick way to extract all of the buildings from the picture. The biggest job of all, however, was masking out the buildings so that characters could walk behind them.

Each of these residents was then created as a digitally-drawn animation, with bonus animations for the named Discworld characters hidden in the city. In parallel, we re-plotted the entire road network - using a mapping tool normally intended for the Roundworld - and converted this map into a grid of paths that our AI residents could follow. We then plotted the location of every chimney in the city, and added the smoke back onto the map as individual animations.

Firstly, we had to remove the static illustrated characters from the streets of the hand-drawn map, along with the illustrated smoke. I remember the first time I saw that beautiful perspective map, put together by the incredibly talented team at The Discworld Emporium - my immediate response was 'we have to bring that to life.'ĭoing so was no mean feat, mind. The biggest challenge was adapting the map itself.

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