Hello, Survivors from all horizons!
We're back with Part 2 of our Q&A, where we continue answering your questions about Endzone 2.
Last week, we covered six questions—this time, we're tackling the last five, sent by you on Discord and Steam.
We will have quite a lot of screenshots to show you in the first answer about the Visual Design Process, we thus uploaded them to Imgur here and they are also individually linked below so you can go and check them in their full size without encumbering this blogpost :)
Let's jump straight into it!
[Visual Design Process]
Q1: Which parts of the process did you find most enjoyable and challenging while bringing these environments to life?
- For example, things like creating textures for the landscape or modeling certain buildings come to mind, but I’d love to hear which parts stood out to you the most in terms of enjoyment and challenges.
From: ShadZ
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A: The visual development process begins with an ideation phase, where concept artists generate a broad spectrum of ideas. These range from loose, exploratory concepts—such as setting the overall mood and tone of expeditions, vehicle designs, and city structures—to more refined and specific design elements, like mock-ups of zones in various states or detailed depictions of settlers. Here are some examples:The visual development process begins with an ideation phase, where concept artists generate a broad spectrum of ideas. These range from loose, exploratory concepts—such as setting the overall mood and tone of expeditions, vehicle designs, and city structures—to more refined and specific design elements, like mock-ups of zones in various states or detailed depictions of settlers. Here are some examples:
Ideation phase (1)
Ideation phase (2)
Ideation phase (3)
The most promising outcomes of this phase are formalized in the Style Guide or Art Bible. The Style Guide captures the project's overall visual essence and design direction. Influenced by game design and the team's creative vision, it serves as both a starting point and a reference for internal team members as well as external stakeholders, including publishers and contractors. E.g.:
Style Guide / Art Bible examples (1)
Style Guide / Art Bible examples (2)
Style Guide / Art Bible examples (3)
Style Guide / Art Bible examples (4)
Style Guide / Art Bible examples (5)
Style Guide / Art Bible examples (6)
In addition to the Style Guide, we maintained a Building Design Breakdown in our project wiki. This resource provided a structured and analytical approach to building design, with practical guidelines focusing on key elements such as footprint, form, color, and materials. It aimed to support artists throughout multiple stages of development.
Building Design Breakdown (1)
Building Design Breakdown (2)
Building Design Breakdown (3)
Building Design Breakdown (4)
Building Design Breakdown (5)
One of the primary challenges during the art and design process was balancing creative goals with economic and technical constraints. Economic factors such as time, budget, team size, and skill level played a critical role, alongside technical considerations related to the chosen engine, tools, and development framework.
Personally, the early concepting stage was the most exciting part of the project. It allowed us the freedom to explore design ideas and visual themes without limitations.
I’m incredibly proud of the art team and what we achieved in a short time frame. The sheer amount of creative content that made it into the final game, although it is not perfect, is a testament to their talent and dedication.
[Revisiting History?]
Q2: A lot of the buildings and even processes actually create a bad footprint similar to that which destroyed the place - how can this game be played so that I don't have to have ugly power stations and destructive mining.
From: LaurieBrooker
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A: Endzone 2 offers various options that depend on the style of play.
On the one hand, the new mechanic of being able to create multiple settlements comes into play here. If a player wants to build a settlement in harmony with nature, he can relocate industrial buildings to other zones and deliver their resources via transport routes.
If every settlement is to be built as nature-friendly as possible, you can try to find and produce as many of the resources whose production would harm the environment as possible in Badlands or buy them from traders.
In addition to some industrial buildings, settlements in Endzone 2 are already designed with sustainability in mind. For example, we have deliberately avoided using coal or gas power plants to generate electricity because we believe that humanity would not make this mistake again.
[Inspirations]
Q3: What are you main inspirations for your work? Where do you go to get ideas for your setting and where do you look to in game design?
From: Winona
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A: The world of Endzone has always been influenced by common post-apocalypse series and games. However, we have always emphasized a more realistic approach that incorporates current issues such as climate change rather than going down the Mad Max road. 🙂 So while series such as Chernobyl were a model for the atmosphere in a nuclear catastrophe, we also drew on daily knowledge and discussions about climate change. In particular, documentary thought experiments on how to survive in a world shaken by climate change were very insightful. You can learn a lot about this on YouTube...
When it comes to game design, we naturally take our own ideas in the first place. But we had to lie if we didn't keep an eye on current city builders, both genre giants and indie developers alike. Play a lot, learn a lot. In the end, however, we always try to add our own touch to the game design.
[Modding]
Q4: Do you have a checklist for stuff you want to include in modding?
- Are you going to provide us with tools and what not or a series of guides?
From: Bum
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A: Currently, we are planning a soft launch of our modding capabilities. So first we want to ship the basic infrastructure, giving the option to mod minor things (icons, loca, etc.). If this goes well and we could gather some feedback about the process we want to keep extending it (allowing you to add new buildings e.g.). Along with every release we also want to ship guides on how to actually do modding.
Q5: Is there a time frame on your calendar where you will drop back and fix some of the problems that a user/player with an OLDer GPU (ie 4 years) card may be unable to start the game at all?
From: oldman_dr
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A: Thank you for contributing your question. We recently switched to DirectX 11 being our default rendering technique to better the situation and we are also working on more improvements in an upcoming release. This won't help out with all graphics cards however, since we do require certain feature levels to make the game work, since some of the game logic runs on GPU instructions. So iGPUs and GPUs under feature Level 12_0 (DirectX 11.3) still won't be able to run the game.
Sadly, hardware manufacturers didn't make it easy to get clear intel on what hardware is installed and what the capabilities are, as you can see it in this table, everything is quite fragmented and not easily distinguishable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_levels_in_Direct3D)
This was the latest hotfix regarding DirectX 11: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2144640/view/512947503265480794