LOOKDEV: Blocking the City

We set out to create a cinematic background for one of NOVEM’s areas, the city.

We first looked at references for developed city places like Shanghai and New York. We noticed they have a common theme of well-developed high class areas being built contrastingly next to places lower-class ones.

To help replicated the sense of realism and familiarity, we set to continue this quirk with our futuristic city. These were elements like areas being overcrowded with transport, with towering buildings bunched together.

We now had to think about how we were going to capture all this in a platform-game. The challenge being capturing the sense of scale and depth of the City/Outskirts with the camera only looking in one direction the whole time.

An element of depth had to be created, by using deep road layouts so the player can get a better idea of the vast scale of the City/Outskirts.

Inspiration for the layout of the city buildings was New York’s grid layout.

Now that we had a building layout of the city that worked with the platform style, we now looked at references to help build the look development of it being abandoned.

Our plan was to make the city very messy and out of place to create the sense of panic, so assets were going to have to be careful placed to capture the story and history behind the City/Outskirts.

In the Outskirts we really wanted to capture how abandoned it is, giving it this erie haunted feel to the area as this is the first level the player will see. We want players to feel instantly desolated.

To capture this we had to create the complete opposite of the city block out. The Outskirts block-out had to be very simplistic and unfinished to show that barely any forms of life remain.

So to do this, the block out for this area had to be composed of more environment instead of the man-made assets.