This week I focused on giving the cryo-bay manager’s office a much-needed facelift — bringing it into much closer alignment with the retrofuturistic aesthetic I originally imagined for Spaceship Down. I’ve always wanted to evoke a particular slice of 1970s sci-fi: not the shiny, utopian 60s-style futurism, but something grittier and more grounded. Think NASA control rooms, Soviet modularity, Alien’s utilitarian corridors, or the crisp, sterile calm of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That tone’s finally coming through.
Visually, I’ve committed to a more cohesive look: you’ll notice the filing cabinet and other furniture elements have been upgraded to better match the overall palette and tone. One of the biggest wins? The off-white wall colouring. It sounds minor, but it’s done a lot to tie the whole room together and really lock in the visual language I want across the ship.
Functionally and narratively, the space now feels more “lived in.” It’s still sparse, still institutional, but you get more of a sense that someone actually used this room – that it wasn’t just placed here for the player to walk through.
The original office
On the dev side, the process is feeling smoother thanks to having these new visual standards in place. With the overall map layouts still being finalised, I’ve had the freedom to make sweeping visual changes without breaking anything — and that flexibility’s been a big boost.
Next up: continuing this visual refinement across adjacent rooms so everything feels like it belongs to the same ship and the same story.