Welcome Prospectors, to a brand new edition of our dev blog newsletter in which we’ll take you on a journey to the massively overhauled surface of the planet Aurora. Yes, our devs in tandem with some of the best voxel artists out there spent the last month or so giving Dawn Apart a much-needed facelift and we couldn’t be more proud of how our game world looks now.
But before we show off our new biomes and document how far along we’ve come with some (pretty drastic) before and after comparisons, another reminder that you can join our ongoing, Discord-exclusive playtest (which will soon include the refurbished landscapes as well). All you have to do is join our Discord channel and sign the pinned form in the #playtest channel and you’ll receive a playtest steam key in the mail!
From procedurally generated to handcrafted
We have always envisioned Dawn Apart to take place on a lush and beautiful planet with different biomes full of intriguing flora and fauna. But when, after initially focusing on game mechanics, we experimented with procedurally generated maps the end result never quite did the trick.
Yes, we had tons of amazing looking voxel assets but randomly sprinkling them over the map didn’t work for us. So, in a rather drastic change, we opted for putting the world design wholly in the hands of collaborating voxel wizards including @abductedbypixel @knosvoxel and @luminousviolett who have in the past worked on real gems such as Teardown or Cloudpunk.
Redesigning Aurora Chunk by Chunk
The workflow went as follows: For each of our four biomes (desert, savannah, rainforest, highlands), the voxel artists designed one or more connected 256x256x256 voxel dioramas including trees, bushes, rock formations, rivers, and monuments like hamlets, crash landing sites, or odeons. We then gave those tiles to our in-house art department who fleshed out and expanded them according to a hand drawn map/matrix consisting of a total of 420 ‘world chunks’.
This method came with a set of unique challenges: Our art team had to be extra careful to connect various tiles seamlessly - especially those that connect different biomes. The artists also had to, along with assigning physical properties to materials such as metal, rock, or glass by color coding them, group and name every object in the landscape (e.g. foliage, trees, decorations) so that everything in a .vox file was parsed into the game scene accordingly.
More than a fresh coat of paint
This was time-consuming but in the end totally worth it, as it led not only to a visual update but improved and expanded the gameplay as well. As opposed to the mostly flat and uninteresting procedurally generated map, you can now discover and explore a living, breathing planet with the right mix of horizontal stretches (deserts, bodies of water) and verticality (steep mountains, cliffs, and jungles).
To conquer this version of Aurora, exploration and terraforming are key: Send a search party through the fog of war and you may discover a crash landing site, an ancient It’ak temple, or a coveted Lucrum deposit . Or remove a mountain top to expand your assembly lines and make room for your growing factory. It has become something of a cliche but with this visual upgrade the planet has become its own character: complex, dangerous and full of surprises.
What do you think of the new look? Let us know in the comments! And if you want to set foot on the planet yourself and give us valuable feedback about the new game world, make sure to join our Discord-exclusive playtest. See you soon on Aurora!