Developer’s Blog: The Art Direction for Light Trail Rush
In a few weeks, Light Trail Rush will get its beta launch. B2Expand invites everybody to sign up and join the beta test. Before it’s March 12th, we will take a look at the development process of this awesome vehicular brawler. In this week’s development update, we take a look at the art. The beta will have some significant changes compared with the alpha version, and Light Trail Rush will look better than ever before.
Light Trail Rush is an arcade vehicular brawler with free-flow 3D space flight. In this game, eight players compete for points in a frenetically-paced atmosphere. The player in first place draws the track and the seven other players aim to push other ships off the track or overtake the lead. Players can customize their ships with tokenized skins and decorations, which are player-owned and stored on the Ethereum blockchain.
How to describe the art style of Light Trail Rush and what feeling should it establish?
Light Trail Rush has a strong identity. We mixed a lot of old-school sci-fi references to obtain a retro-futuristic look. We primarily looked at French artists, like Jean Giraud. The main goal was to separate ourselves visually from the cyberpunk frenzy of the last two years to offer a more organic and retro look and feel. We love hard sci-fi, but I always was more interested in the organic and worn out look, like, for example, the city in ‘The Fifth Element’.
Which science fiction brands or media have influenced the art direction? And how do we see this in the game?
After the pre-production phase, where we gathered as much influence as possible, we tried to mellow the direct hints to ensure the unique feel. But you can still see a lot of inspiration from movies and comics. Mainly movies like ‘The Fifth Element’ and the original ‘Blade Runner’, but also the ‘Heavy Metal’ comics. You can see this in our game because we use “sobel”, which outlines the models with black lines. This gives the architecture of the city and ships the look of a comic book. Our ships aren’t aerodynamics or streamlined but full of details and intricate designs. And the city doesn’t have the “clean” sci-fi look but a more rugged and complex feel.
If you would compare Light Trail Rush visually to three other video games, which ones would that be? And why?
This is a tough question, our goal was to stand apart from the other games, and I think we did a pretty good job at it. From a graphical point of view, we could compare it to Borderlands, as we searched for the same semi-stylized looks. There’s also a resemblance with two old school games: ‘Crazy Taxi’, because of its vehicle design with a strong personality, and ‘Twisted Metal’, because of the chaotic matches.
What enhancements have been added to the beta, compared with the alpha version of the game? How do these enhancements change the game?
There were a lot of performance-driven changes in the shadows. The team reworked the shaders and lighting, and what will be clearly visible are the changes in the user experience during the game. The interface changed a lot to better suit the player’s needs. On top of all that, we changed most of the visual effects. Almost all of them were changed using the new VFX Graph feature within Unity. This allowed us to enhance the look and feel by adding a lot of particles. This has given the game a truly unique look.
The vehicles have very different looks and feel. Where did the inspiration come from for the design of these space ships?
The primary inspiration came from our earlier game ‘Beyond the Void’. We used the look and feel of the families fighting in ‘Beyond the Void’ to base the first ideas for the ships in ‘Light Trail Rush’. The identities of the families were transformed into constructor signatures, and this helped us to narrow the feel behind every ship. For example, Goliath is inspired by the Trexar family, which is why he looks so tough and heavy.
Plus, after the stats and forces of each ship were decided, a lot of references were gathered to achieve a very strong identity for each ship. These inspirations came from everywhere. For example, the main source for Firebird’s mood board was the movie ‘Jupiter Ascending’. On the other hand, Merlin’s mood board was vastly made of concepts of old fighter jets, like the Russian MIG 19 and MIG 21.
The environments are procedurally generated, which means that they change all the time. How does this influence the art direction?
It was a central part of the decision making concerning the environment. The easiest way would have been to create something more “hard sci-fi” to have blocks who can simply attach to each other. But we decided to take another path and go with a modular setup. We had to create each building with bricks that’ll be easy to use for others. In a way, the choice of a procedural environment saved us a lot of time and is the heart of the city look & feel. It was different for the asteroids. We decided to not use pre-made blocks but to generate them using voxels. This was risky since we were only controlling the texture looks, but with the help of the developers, we managed to use this as a way to have really unique looking asteroid fields.
Light Trail Rush is a very fast game. How do you make sure that the visual adds to that sense of speed?
You don’t have to only take the speed in the count, but also the fact that the player is completely free while creating the trail. If it was only the speed, like any other racing game, the best way is to simplify the purely aesthetic environment and focus on the tracks.
For us it was more of a challenge: The buildings had to be simple, yet complex enough to allow interesting paths for the player. For this, we worked really close to the game designers to find the best compromise. Another thing we had to cheat because of the speed was the scale. The map is really big and doing everything at a 1:1 scale would’ve compromised the game performances. That’s why we modified the camera to give the impression of a normal scale, but in fact, the buildings are really massive.
How do tokenized game assets on the blockchain influence your art direction? Because you’re making something that only a few people will own, but many people will want to have.
We don’t discriminate between a blockchain or standard assets. We gather all the information about the price, deadlines and amounts, and then decide how much time we’ll allow for the creation. After that, it is the same pipeline with the same goal: to offer the best for the player. The differences between blockchain and regular assets are only affected by the monetization strategy, the artistic goal remains the same.
Final question. Which visual elements make Light Trail Rush stand out?
It’s difficult to choose one element. The art direction and looks for ‘Light Trail Rush’ are the results of a lot of bold choices. The goal was to offer something that stands out visually on every aspect and to tell a story which is completely different. If I really had to choose it’ll be the ships. They are the core of the game and they took a lot of time to get done. Where every other racing game offers the classical streamlined and functional look, our ships are a tribute to the more “romantic” approach of earlier games. In those older games, vehicles were created the same way as any other character, with a history and a strong identity.
Don’t forget to add Light Trail Rush to your Steam wishlist.
