Vore, Textures, New Character Style

Author: Salireths

This month was loaded with working on a bunch of small features (and art) that together add up towards the build. While we started a bunch of things, we didn't have quite enough time to polish them and make them fully presentable, so instead, in this post we're going to show a bunch of work-in progress shots of what's been worked on last month, and we would love to keep on making posts like these more often. 

  🔹  Interactions, beginning of vore   🔹 

   🔴  Check this section out even if you're not into vore. Items and swallowed characters basically work similarly.  🔴 

So for the build we still need to do a digestion and simulation system, and instead of doing good old boring "hunger meter" we decided to take a deeper dive into the bowels of digestion.  

And since  both items and characters share some movement and physics code, it was only natural to let creatures to pick up, put them into mouth (or other orifices), and welcome them into the insides!

It starts from picking up the target, food items or smaller characters - they work the same.

Then you can put them inside your mouth, and hold them there (later we'll add more animations for prey and let the predator play with the prey too)

Mouth is not the only orifice that you can put things into, our design goal always was to allow systemic interactions with your own body, experiment what can go where and cause different effects. Not only small characters will be insertable there...

Prey/items can be released...

Yeeted away...

Or swallowed. When you (or any item) enters a creature's body through any orifice, a separate game level loads (using our existing mini-dimension system). 

This level is not going to be only for graphical representation of the creature's insides (art is not done yet, thats why we use blue pipes), but it also going to be digesting items, breaking them down and passing them to intestines, absorbing nutrient matter it can, and, on creature's demand, getting rid of wastes it couldn't digest.

The special pipeline movement mode is not only useful for digestive tracts, but also navigation around the world waypoints (Futurama-style), replacing ladders, tight cave tunnels.

Also small creatures can find the way into some nooks and crannies that bigger creatures can't...

  🔹   Interspace   🔹  

More graphical-related work is being done on the start of the game, as well as the first level. Not only from graphical perspective, but lore as well. 

This is the very early WIP of the egg (stasis chamber) that you start the game in. 

Player needs to float towards the crystal and interact with it in order to both learn how to interact with objects and crack the egg to progress further. The crystal grants you the Aura, which is responsible for all kinds of environmental protection, shields, abilities, as well as HUD.

This is a very early screenshot done in Blender, it is only a prototype and I promise it's gonna look better soon. In this image we're just testing new improved material style we've done this month as well, which will greatly boost our future art creation speed. The material is the same in Blender, Unreal Engine 4, and Substance Designer - all programs unified for better visual control.

The barren misty Interspace is being transformed into a strange organic forest/egg chamber, unraveling the mystery of which is what players going to do at the start of the game.

  🔹   Textures   🔹  

We're further refining the art style, and a key to that is the new materials and rendering post-effects, which focuses on interesting shapes and silhouettes over noisy textures.

These textures are done in Substance Designer. They aren't hand-drawn, but made out of combining many procedural noises and math.

While they might lack some realism details, they aren't excessively noisy and they have a unique geometric aesthetic which is reflected in all other art-assets (trees, rocks, etc.).

This stylization approach reduces the time to make those textures significantly, compared to previous styles we've used. This is a natural evolution of our previous methods.

Textures are created ambiguous of color and material, making it possible to re-use them in many different applications. This one above, while looking like a color vomit to the naked eye, can be easily colored in-game and turned into pleasant tree roots, vines, or the interspace organic technology. 

And even complex effects, such as filling these small natural reservoirs with water, are possible.

 🔶  New character style  🔶 

And last, but not least, we're looking into making a new character rendering style as well, inspired by shows like Dragon Prince and Beastars. 

However, there is more to this than just the new looks - the main reason of why we're looking into it, is that this workflow makes art creation process much much faster!

This means that instead of spending a full year on making a handful of pre-defined species with limited customization options, we can make a bodypart (or two) a day and make a full-fledged character editor, where players will be able to make their own species themselves, eventually.

It would be possible to assemble original characters out of body-parts, which can be acquired by playing the game and finding randomized NPCs that you can "Organicaly Interface" with, essentially a breeding mechanic.

I personally believe that this new style is going to be very memorable and visually striking. I feel something very familiar and comfortable when I look at it, and for some reason, I can't look away. 

And besides, those screenshots are only tests that took very little time to make in comparison to the current character. There is so much you can achieve with this, look what they did in our inspiration sources mentioned above! 

Stay tuned about more updates on new artstyle as we progress - we're just getting started, and it already made production of our game faster and much more fun to do!