Hey everyone!
It's time for another update on what's happening behind the scenes. Since this year started, we have been hard at work to get our new enemies designed, modeled, textured, animated and moving around the world of INDUSTRIA 2. The other thing we spent some time on, was refining our environment art workflows.
Since we started, we often came back to Half-Life: Alyx and their environment design workflows. We are a young studio, learning a lot as we make this second game. So to learn good environment art, we came to the conclusion to look at games who did it right. For us long term Valve game fans, it was an easy choice: Half-Life: Alyx offers a super transparent look behind the asset creation process through the workshop tools everyone can use. Here we learned how to create efficient assets, the right amount of detail and smart material usage.
Valve used something called “Hotspot” texturing. Maybe you have heard about it already if you're into game development. If not, it's a simple, yet efficient way to texture any object quickly, with just a handful, sometimes just one texture map. Normally, you create unique textures for your models, resulting in hundreds, sometimes thousands of unique materials in the game. Hotspots solve this manual labor (and performance issue) by automatically picking the right part of a large texture map for the right polygon. What comes out is a pretty satisfying looking asset, featuring edge wear. That way, a whole train carriage can use the same 2 materials like the tracks it stands on, or the metal railings or pipes on the wall.
To get enough visual variety, we added a color wheel option per model as well as a vertex painting shader, so we can paint rust, dirt or color layers on top of the metal, wood or plaster. Since we are using Unreal Engine 5, we can't use the wonderful tools Valve built for their Hammer Editor. But we can try to get close with the tools Unreal provides, as well as some improvisation. We are super pleased with the look of INDUSTRIA 2. It's much more streamlined and optimized then what we achieved in the first game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGEWGzTg8tw
The other big thing we did in January was getting our final new enemies into the game. This is probably the 6th generation of enemies since we started INDUSTRIA back in 2015 and definitely the most complex we ever made. It started with designing them based on concept art and really finishing the lore behind those enemies, so they fit into the universe properly. We call them the “Hollows”, a machine built worker unit, maintaining the ATLAS fluid network all over the country.
The main feature here was to make a disgusting looking machine, really blurring the line between organic and machine built. It's supposed to be this dirty, oily, creepy AI controlled humanoid wandering through the world of INDUSTRIA. You should almost feel sorry for it when it stumbles through dark corridors. Until it wants to rip you apart.
For this task, we knew that variety was key. Variety in their looks, in their states, in their animations and in their sound design. We want vivid shot reactions on different body parts, as well as satisfying feedback when hitting them with bullets or melee. Our animator Ben has to undergo a long process of creating enough animations and stances so that, even when there are three of these beasts walking towards you, they all look unique and characterful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qokmVSGYwKM
Their foot placement also is a huge task to get right. You probably all know how it looks, when characters in games have feet sliding all over the scene. Getting this right is super hard, but we are trying to improve on that front compared to the first game. Going forward, we are trying to give them even more creepy-vibes, by controlling where they turn their heads, for example when reacting to their buddies dying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54ujiljBv8c
All in all, character animation as well as good AI is one of the hardest things to get right and one of those subjects, where you can spend weeks and months to make it look satisfying. We don't have unlimited time, so we won't have AAA quality characters. But in the end, we are neither AAA, nor AA and still just a tiny indie team scattered around the globe trying to make something awesome with the limited resources we have available.
We hope you like what you saw and wish all of you a wonderful February.
Until the next dev update!
The Bleakmill Team
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2154070/INDUSTRIA_2/