Art Blog 10 – A Breath of Fresh Air

Hey there folks,

Hope you’ve all heard the news that we’ve been Greenlit. Again, thank you for all your help and support if you voted for us.

We’ve been working on putting together the exterior of the ship superstructure which is a nice change from the claustrophobic maze of rooms and corridors of the interior. Of course, with a procedural ship, the size and shape of the ship will be changing with each playthrough and modelling many different ships is both inefficient, and does not give us much variation. Instead, we’ve been modelling it piece by piece. By creating repeatable tiles, we can expand the size and change the shape of the ship to fit with the level accordingly.

So far, the outer deck sections only spawned at the edge of the ship as a small exterior section that did not connect to any other places. They were pretty useless, having a similar behavior to the rooms but with fewer spawn locations. Ultimately players would find themselves running out to these sections when chased and with nowhere to go or hide, they would have no chance to escape.

The exterior sections have been redesigned, now with walkways acting more like corridor pieces, linking up the exterior walkways and giving the player a lot more freedom.

Below is an example of the modular tiles put together in Autodesk Maya to immitate a section of a ship that has been put together procedurally. So far, this is only limited to the top superstructure of the ship, but the rest of the ship will work in a similar way once implemented.

Here is an exploded version showing each tilable section. Overall, 18 tile variations are used to construct the current superstructure of the ship.

We can add additional floors, windows and walkways accordingly.

On the inside, we’ve been playing with shaders to get the kitchen looking shiny. We are using static cubemaps to make the metal in there look very reflective. A problem we are encountering however is that even in the pitch black areas, we still have reflections from the cubemap showing, making these areas look overly shiny and unrealistic. So it’s a little wrong for now but when it’s right, combined with the dramatic shadows that are cast by the models, we should have a very eerie feeling room.

Next up, security room and showers!