Art Blog 07 – Starting to take shape

Hi everyone!

We’re preparing to show some footage of the game in the near future, we thought it’d be a good time to talk about some of our inspirations regarding the game’s setting!

Just to recap: the game is set on a derelict cargo vessel from the 70’s. So we had some fun researching the time period and took a lot reference from the grey and gloomy and more British working class/industrial themes from that era.

Here’s a shot form Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. We’ve taken lots of inspiration from scenes similar to this as they provide a great visual base for us to take from, falling in line with our chosen themes. We feel this one in particular has lots of things we could use to realise our cargo decks!

Naturally, taking inspiration from 70’s cop and spy dramas, we took a lot of our environmental assets from 70’s police station props. I was a fan of the dark wooden tables, storage boxes and the mess of paper, where everything was stored in physical folders where as now we store the majority digitally.

Unlike normal cargo ship bunk designs, where most of the ship’s furniture is built into the room itself, we had to build our furniture assets separate from the room for the sake of gameplay and procedural generation. A lot of our furniture items use a lot of metal bars and basic shapes to keep them simple, but functional. Fit for a working environment.

To add more personality to the more lived in sections of the ship we added pictures and old posters of the previous crew’s favourite movies. Our artist Andy took some inspiration from 70’s poster design created some posters for the blockbuster releases such as “The Court Process” and “Clutch Control”, truly genre defining police action films. We’re planning to add a lot more of the crew’s belongings into the mix, such as books, picutes, notes, vinyls, and more posters!

We’ve not just been working on the rooms though. Just like the early mobile phone devices, we wanted to make our cameras look simple, robust and clunky to convey how old they are. Looking like the cross between a Warhammer bolter weapon and your granddad’s first personal computer, we came up with this early design for the mysterious cameras dotted around the ship. 

We are looking forward to showing you the upcoming bridge, mess and recreational rooms, which are starting to look really neat. We’re busy making all the things shown and not-so-shown look prettier for the upcoming trailer…

ALSO! We’ve now got proper models for the lights in the scene! No more magical floating light sources!

Until next time!