Warped Universe is in Steam Cyberpunk Fest this week, Aug 3-10, which seemed like a good excuse to talk about where our look came from.
Where the look came from
Back in our brainstorm phase we were discussing old sci-fi movies we loved, all of us being huge sci-fi fans, and as we discussed the ideas and looks and how they came to be, we started looking at the actual concept art of those movies. The Blade Runner concept art by Syd Mead really struck us with the watercolor look and contrasting colors. It had this mystique, where retro meets future.
We love contrast, and finding balance, and we feel that his work really shows the balance well. Our game is very much old meets new in many ways, and we all became fascinated with Syd's work to the point where we decided that we should make our game look more like the concept art, and Syd's other works expanding beyond Blade Runner, rather than basing it on the look straight from those movies.
*Very early environment designs of Warped Universe, inspired by Syd Mead concept art
Concept art gets to be loose in a way a film set can't. The brushwork is visible. Light does things that would be impossible or expensive to actually build. Mead's paintings have that quality where the shadows are doing as much work as the light, and you can feel the paint. That's what we wanted, not the finished look of the film, but painterly with a feeling it has been brushed, from someone or some entity's mind. As a small team with a limited budget, we felt we could lean into that imperfection in ways to make it stand out, feel different than most other space games, and make it feel like you're in a completely different universe, with different rules and physics. We wanted it to be WARPED, weird, psychedelic, and feel like you are truly escaping this world.
We also decided on having our characters remain crisp, clear, and polished to have a contrast with the world and universe you are playing in. To stand out, and feel like you’re in a strange and unfamiliar setting. You are not from here, but you are immersed in it.
Ground mission on the planet New Prime
Most cyberpunk sits in neon on grey, and we ended up somewhere else with the purples and teals and pinks. We have plenty of neon too, it just tends to arrive as blasts of color rather than a wash of it.
Spaceflight in Warped Universe
Where the organic tech came from
When you first log in and start playing, you find yourself on Nexus Station and it has a very organic look. Everything is smooth and blended in, like it was alive or grew rather than being built. While Syd Mead was a major inspiration in the overall texture, painterly look and colors, the space age era and art from that retro futurist time period was just as big for this part of it, along with architecture like the Theme Building at LAX. All those curves and bends and arches from an era when people thought the future was going to be smooth instead of angular. That building is a big part of where Nexus Station came from.
We wanted tech that appears malleable, like it's all connected and all made from the same one material, because in our universe, it basically is. In the Warped Universe it's Residuum. A material that morphs and changes, and out here gravity and light aren't constants, so a hard, paneled, riveted construction would have felt wrong. It also just made sense for our fiction.
The Theme Building at LAX
Nexus Station
The other side of it, our facilities
Nexus Station is the smooth organic side of our tech, but it's not the whole picture. Out on planet maps we have facilities, which are printed structures you go to and run missions around, and for those we went in a completely different direction. They're brutalist. Big heavy slabs and hard angles, because they're early stage construction on alien worlds and they have to be tough enough to take whatever that environment throws at them.
They use the same underlying tech as Nexus and they're evolving the same way, they just start out rough. And this is probably the most traditionally cyberpunk part of our game, with the neon in them, though it shows up differently than it would in a city. Not signage and advertising, more like the building telling you what's powered and what isn't.
Inside shot of a facility in Warped Universe
Why a painterly universe made sense for this story
The look isn't only taste. It comes out of what the Warped Universe actually is.
Everything here is built from the wreckage of somebody else's revolution. A civilization that ran on an artificial intelligence, thousands of years of peace, and then a rejection of that authority that shattered reality itself. We wrote that story up a while back if you want to check it out: Schism.
Residuum is what was left of it. That's the resource you're collecting on every mission. It's the building block that Nexus Station uses to print new planets. It's what rebuilds your body after warping back from every mission. And it's what heals you when you take damage.
A universe made of shattered reality and rebuilt from its own wreckage might not look photoreal. It might look half-remembered. The painterly treatment is the universe telling you it isn't finished, but rather being built and created as we move forward. Physics doesn't follow the same rules, your body isn't the same, and the balance of light and gravity is constantly morphing and changing the Universe itself.
And while we don't share the classic gritty look of cyberpunk in city rainy streets, the genre's look and ours were inspired from the same paintings. It feels like we've gone full circle to our roots in a way. It feels nice.
If you haven't run into us before
Warped Universe is free to play in Early Access Season Zero, and we're really excited to be part of the Cyberpunk Fest on Steam. Step through the portal and leave your mark on the Universe. Every mission you complete has an effect on the universe for all playing.
Thanks for joining us on this journey.
-The Warped Games Team