Blog post #5: Concepting and world-building

World-building and concepting goes hand-in-hand in game making. At least from our experience. World-building of course started much earlier (we had essential narrative script, synopsis and first draft cut-scene scripts already made 2016. Lots have changed from the early narrative scripts, but foundation for the game hasn't.) Concept art adds an essential layer for the world-building.

Well, basically a lot was established for the first level, when we made GemFall Workforce Inc. -Harkness' Shift. It helped to build the setting for it. Instead of being just a space ship and Harkness being just a jack-of-all-trades in some unspecified ship, now we have a work ship that belongs to GemFall Workforce Inc. and Harkness is working as an employee there. We know what GemFall Workforce Inc. does, so we know that level one ship is going to be used to mining and shipping gems.

We had early assets for corridors, but we have now made better drawings and concepts of them. Making them feel more like sci-fi, but keeping practical aspects in them too. Like, if we were working on a space ship that specializes in hard labor like space mining and shipping, what kind of shape is working. Even though we probably don't see that labor in the game or anything, it's still a vital part because we have chose to make practical sci-fi setting for the game. Every aspect of the design is aiming to help people, hybrids and androids to work and live easier. That's actually a slogan for GemFall Workforce Inc. Or at least it should be.

Corridor concept drawings

So, concepting for us is also asking those stupid questions like, "How they're moving in there?", "If you bring a load of gems in this section, because, that's what they're handling here, how that's going to work?", "Where do they eat?" and "How is... um... waste control working?"

And I confess now that that last one just came to my mind while writing and it's really good question. We could go easy way, saying that they just control it. But with lot of hybrids in same place there's going to be waste. Something about burning them for energy because that seems energy efficient. (Which also comes from the fact that this world cares about being highly energy efficient.) But how they control burning the waste? You see this is a endless pit, but nice pit for a writer.

In the end of this week, we're trying to get a nice corridor assets ready or at least planned them so we can start thinking them in 3D and bring them into Unity for testing.

_Rx3 Team