Our Art Lead, ESC, and the 3D Rework

Overview

The last two weeks were full of a ton of work, most of it not programming related. The good news is that this work resulted in major changes (improvements to the game overall).

The largest of these changes is that Exofactory now has an art lead. So we should start to see some visual improvements soon.

Art Lead

The big news, as mentioned above, is that Exofactory now has an art lead. While the artist search was originally focused on finding an artist to create some assets for the game, after speaking with Julija, I was convinced that hiring an art lead who can help drive game art direction made sense.

I simply lack the skills and don't think the game would be best served by me driving the art direction.

We've been working together for a bit now and the game now has an aesthetic that we are aiming for.

I'm excited to work together and lots is to be done.

If you want to learn more about Julija, you can take a look at her portfolio here.

ESC

If the single reader of this dev blog is wondering why there wasn't an update last week, the reason was me being distracted by the Eurovision Song Contest!

The resulting party and extra long get-together may have also impacted the progress this week, but I'll just say it was worth it.

We're now 3D!

The major work over the past two weeks was porting the game to be 3D. Not terribly hard, but it was a lot of work. (Just FYI: these are not final art assets. So don't worry.)

Part of this work was writing a programmatic terrain generator. Regardless of whether the game will have an infinite map or a more limited hand tuned one, having the terrain be autogenerated lightens the load substantially.

Funnily enough, generating the terrain takes just enough time to justify adding a game loading screen. So we now have one of those.

Conclusion

Pretty happy this week. Lots of important work was started and the game now has an artistic direction.