Hello raiders!
It’s always great to reconnect with you, sharing our work and enthusiasm for this project. We love involving you in our creation process, letting you peek into our minds as if we were raiders, extracted and installed on old pieces of metal.
Speaking of raiders, that’s our topic for today. In the demo, you meet several characters, and there will be more in the final version of the game. Our challenge was how to portray them. We wanted to ensure that the representation of the raiders was integrated into the lore. Our goal was to depict the raider’s biological part, the part that was destroyed and erased by the extraction. It’s like delving into their consciousness to see a representation of themselves, a kind of memento mori.
The image the raiders present to the outside world is primarily a 'mental' image, what the raiders imagine or remember of their biological bodies before the Extraction. Take, for example, Old Joe, a character you saw in the demo.
In the process of creating a raider, after building their narrative, we start making sketches before finalizing the design. We won’t reveal too much about Old Joe since you'll meet him in the final version of the game, but we’ll use him as an example to illustrate our creation process. We started with a design, exploring a "death mask" direction. We imagined Old Joe’s corpse without his consciousness, with his face covered.
But something was missing. The raiders' memories are often confused, traumatic, fragmented, or even nonexistent, like the protagonist's. On the space stations, we represented this with their form: recycled pieces, piled metal carcasses (as mentioned in an earlier dev diary). How could we convey the same concept in the image a raider retains in their memory?
We came up with a VFX that fragments and traumatizes the image, as if seen through an old broken device.
After applying the VFX, we continue to edit the source image, and only after several attempts do we insert it into the game. This requires us to reduce each raider's details to the essentials, to avoid making the image fuzzy after applying the VFX. But it also means capturing the true essence, the heart of the raider, emphasizing the biological part that every raider has lost forever.
So, we’ve come to the end of this dev diary. We hope you enjoyed it and look forward to the next one.
Farewell, raiders!