After years of hard work, we are thrilled to officially announce that Synergy will be released in early access on May 21st!
Watch the release date trailer on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/sF9s3N9qUmw
We can't wait for you to experience this early access version and collect your feedback.
To tide you over, here's our latest devlog about how the developers took inspiration from the Moebius style to create Synergy.
The community has spoken! Your questions were numerous, and we've decided to dedicate this devlog to the one that kept coming back: how did you manage to capture the style of Moebius in a video game? And what were the challenges associated with that? Okay, okay, that's two questions, I see you coming! Vito Salamone - Lead Artist is here to answer you today.
The main motivation was to faithfully recreate the unique characteristics of traditional comic books. Therefore, it was only natural to employ a technique that closely resembled it to capture its essence as much as possible.
Thus, all the game assets were created in 2D using a graphics tablet. Extensive research was conducted beforehand to achieve a result that best encapsulates the textured, organic aspects, as well as the roughness of a medium's grain.
This choice was also motivated by the available production resources, which were mainly oriented towards 2D.
Regarding the style itself, it was important to preserve the dreamlike and light-hearted imprint characteristic of Moebius' style.
From a technical standpoint, this life is symbolized by a rough, trembling, and textured line that draws itself in soft and nonlinear curves. All of this is complemented by debris of lines reminiscent of organic movement and physical support.
In the context of a city builder where many elements are displayed on the screen, the challenge is to make everything readable and coherent for the player. It's important to strike a good balance between a visually consistent and immersive environment to maintain visual enjoyment while also ensuring maximum accessibility and ease of understanding.
To clearly distinguish between different types of objects, color-coding was implemented. Given the visual style's flexibility, which allows for a wide range of colors, it was relatively straightforward to opt for color codes that allow players to quickly identify the family of objects to which a building belongs: yellow for industrial, green for cultural buildings, purple for healthcare and prevention structures, etc.
Building upon this idea, it was important for players to also find enjoyment in constructing a beautiful city. Beyond survival objectives, players have the opportunity to arrange their city as they see fit. This includes creating cities and villages with multiple intertwining colors or more orderly arrangements, breathing life into the overall environment.
Once the elements were integrated, the challenge shifted to their animation. Bringing all these elements to life can quickly become time and resource-intensive. Therefore, puppet animation was quickly favored—a technique that involves cutting out each character and building element to animate them piece by piece. This allowed for a wide range of movements while remaining consistent with the initial vision and maintaining credibility in terms of production reality.
In conclusion, translating this visual style into a video game required a lot of observation and preparation. The guiding principle was to achieve a result that is as visually appealing on the screen as it is enjoyable to explore.
-Vito Salamone Lead artist
We hope you enjoyed this 7th Devlog! Thank you so much for your support and see you soon for the next one!
Wishlist now and get notified for launch:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989070/Synergy/