Coders hard at work

This week was the week of answering hard questions. UE5 and Unity were fighting a battle as each of our devs was prototyping in their designated engine, but the favour has finally leaned towards Unreal Engine as our playground of choice. It has a fantastic water system greatly suited to our game, as well as great shader options to make it look cozy.

Artistic testing

We'd decided on gradient texturing as the de facto approact to our assets; now it was time to research our artstyle in more depth to begin building an art bible, as well as to dictate how our environment might look like. To help our decision making, as well as our coders to better orient themselves, we made a quick blockout of a game environment in UE5 using simple shapes and some readily available assets.

After, we quickly adjusted a dummy blockout in zbrush to check our proportions against the raft, as well as the readability of the players on screen. This is necessary for us to know how big things are in comparison to each other, and where distortion will be necessary for our animations and the far-off camera view.

We'd been gathering references for our artstyle for a week; it was time to think about creating our art bible. To define our artstyle - shape language especially - blocking it out was the most straightforward way to go, along with making notes of our favourite references. A lot of the shapes can be re-used later on, and we can have a good grasp on how to layer and clutter our environment. We started collecting references we hadn't looked at before, such as HUD and UI, RFX that will pop up, and proportion. Ditmir, our sound designer, began his work on the sound bible.

Our environment isn't the focus of the game, so it will be using a small asset pack with the gradient texture workflow we tested out last week. This will keep the shape language and color palette unified.

Furthermore, to break our ground we tried a tileable easily changeable grass and rock texture. Inside of unreal the use of the height map would come in handy. With a simple subdivided plane rocks could easily be faked.