Hello everyone,
today we're gonna start with something unexpected - with a beautiful sky at sunset.
I beg your pardon, one may say, isn't it a screenshot of Red Dead Redemption 2? Precisely, it's RDR 2 ineed and we brought it on purpose. This piece of video game art shows us how volumetric clouds can provide us with the sense of a game. You spend 2 hours riding a horse and staring on clouds and then you're done and go to sleep. Gameplay!
Would mechanics work without aesthetics? Sounds kinda doubtful to us. For example, Alexander, our game director, had his own way playing GTA Vice City back in the days: jump on a plane, tune in Emotion FM and fly over the city, screaming I just died in your arms tonight loudly. Alexander didn't care that much on the narrative driven missions. Remember the one with a toy helicopter and bombs? There is the most popular comment saying "This mission was made by satan". So true. It's not fun, it's just very torturous gameplay. But the immersion of the city is that what makes this game great.
We have been keeping this in mind since the very start of production: a visual sense can be a game mechanic itself. If you've played the original Sea Dogs by Akella you'd remember those skies at sunset. Probably, this was the reason we try to build a beautiful game, and not just mechanically reach playable system.
This week we were working on tuning the ship economy, production GUI and balance. But also - we redid the system of procedural grass and amended the lighting system. Because these silly things eventually create the whole game experience.