Hello everyone! It’s me, Fredrik, director of Combustion back again for another pawgress report.
Today I am going to highlight one aspect I am very proud of which is the signature look and vibe of Combustion. Let’s get into it, shall we?
Atmosphere
Combustion intends to have a dark atmosphere that permeates the city Norrune where the game takes place. It’s dark, industrial, but should also feel lived in and believable.
It is of course difficult to describe “atmosphere”, as it is more of a feeling and about the totality of sound, music, visuals and even mechanics. But what I find in development is that one informs another and everyone in the development team has an understanding of the atmosphere the game intends to have by just seeing or listening to the contributions of others. A very organic, living form of development I am happy to see build up the world over time.
To make the world feel just that much more real, there is a button dedicated to smelling.
(Atmosphere you can almost smell it. Calico can describe it to you)
Commuting through Norrune.
Norrune nightlife
One thing I feel gives life to a scene is to always have something “alive” about it. Even in a completely still location with no other people, there’s a gust of smog, a sparking fuse box, a billowing flag, a swarm of flies around trash. It’s a living concrete jungle, the city called Norrune.
(Music video)
Practical Design
The world of Combustion is inhabited by a variety of animal persons and takes place in a city made up of oil rigs. Questions quickly arise as you walk through the urban environments of this concrete jungle such as… how do these people live?
While the game never gets bogged down into specificities, the goal is to have things make sense with an underlying thread of logic. Little bits of scenery, conversation, advertisement, etc that helps sell the world as a real place.
Bathroom. Notice there are stalls, urinals and sinks in different sizes
Combustion feature 5 different toilets (Not counting the 3 different urinals)
The definition for good sci-fi worldbuilding is little cleaning robots to fill out the scene.
Lighting (Or Lack Thereof)
Tonally, Combustion is a colorful noir. It has the same degree of contrast and harsh shadows as the black and white cinematic classics such as “The Maltese Falcon” or “Sunset Boulevard”. The light (And subsequent lack of it) becomes not only a great way to highlight the important things of a scene, but becomes a visual metaphor for our characters’ state of mind. The changes and transitions in lighting are there to say something about what our character is feeling or thinking. It might not be the most realistic, but the game certainly has an elevated sense of reality about it at times.
Applying more modern lighting techniques with a modern game engine really helps make the game feel authentic, though it technically isn't. Its bloom and volumetric lighting really become something akin to watching one of the pre-rendered backgrounds of the era via a glowing CRT monitor.
Our lead character Calico is one with deep inner conflicts and who witnesses a great many things in the span of the game. In a lot of ways I feel the light, scenery and details that are given priority in the environment are in a way filtered or skewed in an emphasized way to really underline that we are seeing the world through his eyes.
And it's those eyes and the person attached to them we will be exploring in the coming updates as it is through Calico we experience the story. The world he sees, the people he knows and how he sees, listens, thinks, talks and walks through life should be an interesting thing to share next, so look forward to that.
You can say a lot with very little
While Combustion is a dark and gloomy setting, it actually uses a lot of color in its lighting
Volumetric and dynamic lighting
That’s it for the second development update. We’d love to hear what you think, what you want to know and what you want to see from the project in these updates.
And if you haven't done it already, don't forget to add Combustion to your wishlist!
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