Hello!
It’s time for another look behind the curtains of the design of The Riftbreaker. The action of the game is set hundreds of years into the future, which means that human technology has advanced exponentially. Rift travel, quantum computing and quick 3D printing of buildings are just the tip of an iceberg of technologies Ashley will make use of on her mission on Galatea 37. Anyone thrown into the world of the future would feel out of place, so it is our job to make the tech look somewhat familiar using the tools we have. Today we’ll show you how we do it using modeling and animations.
Solar Panels procect themselves when the conditions aren't right for them.
First of all, as long as it is possible, we try to design our buildings to clearly show their purpose at first glance. The best examples of this practice are Wind Turbines and Solar Panels. While designing these buildings we took the common concepts for how they look like in our times and added some futuristic twists. In the world of the Rifbreaker, the turbines are vertical fans that turn as much of the airflow as they can into electrical energy, thanks to their lightweight, nanofiber mesh that the fan blade is made of. The same philosophy applies to our Solar Panels. They resemble the actual panels you might see around in the real world. What makes them stand out is their ability to follow the Sun’s movement and fold down when the conditions aren’t right for energy collection.
We try to design buildings in such a way that their purpose is known at a glance, either through the design itself or through additional effects.
Things are a little bit different when it comes to buildings like Carbonium and Steel Factories. Normally, we imagine steel and coal production as a multi-person, large-scale operation. In our case, both buildings are automatically operated and considerably smaller than what we are used to. In order to make sure that the players know that they’re looking at we turned to custom animations. Even small elements, such as a drill smashing carbonium chunks into pieces, or blobs of liquid metal flowing along the sides of the factory go a long way when it comes to representing that the building actually does
Even if you don't know exactly what a building does, the effects and animations should let you at least make an educated guess.
We follow the same philosophy even when it comes to more futuristic, advanced buildings that you don’t see every day. The Gas Filtering Plant takes much of its design from water treatment facilities. Communications Hub refracts the light around it while operational to symbolize downloading data. All the little details give The Riftbreaker its characteristic visual style, that’s both pleasant to the eye and easy to follow. If you want to check it out in action, join our live streams!
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