Hail Elyrians!

It is time to SHINE! Last week, I showed you all stuff literally straight from our dev tools, hot off the presses so to speak. There is still a lot more of the traversal mechanics to show, but the content team asked me to wait a week before we show anything more off there because they’re in the middle of producing the rough animations for some of the traversal types we’ve yet to show you. (For those curious: some balance and climbing and running mechanics)

And you know, when the team says, “hey wait a second on that, it’s gonna be even cooler in a little bit,” I listen… but I’m not going to lie. That left me wondering what I was going to show, since the traversal stuff is what I’ve been most involved in of late. I was worried for a second, but then Heat pointed out that I never shared the integration composition he did for the riverfront Janoa. So, I figured we’d set up a “cadence” here where we stagger what we show. If I can maintain it, I think I’m going to alternate each week between showing images & other stuff we have in the game’s depository that we’ve never shown and showing raw or very early implementation stuff. Since we showed some raw dev work last week, showing Heat’s piece here this week will maintain that cadence, so far.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t know that I can keep that up. As much as I LOVE the art and other static assets we have in the depository, nothing beats the elation of being able to show you all what we’re working on right now. So, we’ll see if I can keep it up!

In the meantime, though, check this out:

(Click here for full size)

This sort of concept composition work is done to illustrate how the concepted work is meant to integrate into the game world’s environments. In this case, Heat built up a reference scene of the appropriate biome, then worked the Janoan architecture into the scene to show how those structures would be arranged in said environment. Compositions like this allow us to get a sense of scale, tonality, and overall “feel” for an area, so that everyone involved in production can better understand how it all fits together. How it integrates, if you will.

Once we’ve hit on the sort of integration we’re expecting in a composition like this, the rest of the content team uses it as a reference target when building those assets and that biome in the world. In this piece, we were exploring how the Janoa might build along a river, given the rough and steep terrain of the biome. As you can see, hopefully, it should make for some very interesting settlements!

That’s it for this week; until next time…

Stay shiny, my friends!