Lead Environment Artist, Turbulent Games
It's going great for a city that's a little bit, how should I say, a little bit of a dark place. But yeah, the city is huge and it's a big mandate, I would say.
It's nearly twice, just a little bit under twice as big in terms of the distance from the center of the city to the outskirts.
And a big part of the reason for that expansion is to add a bunch of new buildings and new locations so we can add more gameplay to the landing zones and stuff. And again, we'll be talking about that in ISC in the new year.
TL;DRThe team says they pick what they want to work on, naming building interiors, underground facilities and surface compounds, and more collaboration with the Manchester team, while some mandates can't yet be discussed.
The building interiors. So in the future, I'm going to develop the building interiors and I'm very much interested in developing the procedural level building basically.
And building interiors are not just to be able to walk inside a building and have more stuff to look at. You mean building interiors so that we can do mission content and gameplay content and stuff like that inside.
And mine would be the opposite, doing exteriors, since I've been doing a lot of interiors since I started, well, besides Ghost Hollow. I don't know if I can say what I'll be working on...
Yes, you can. Nothing you guys are working on is secret.
So I'll be jumping onto the UGFs, the underground facilities. And the Montreal team is going to start with the first zone, the surface parts. So working directly on the planet and making a big compound.
That's another thing that we came here for. We wanted to meet with John Griffith and company so that we could get a solid kickoff and hit the ground running in Q1.
Yeah, since they'll be working on the UGF as well, but in different zones. So we'll be working as a team, but Montreal will be working on the surface and Manchester will be working on one of the floors, and then we'll switch and dig.
And that's the thing you want to be working on that you're not already working on.
Actually, our next mandates are so awesome that... We always pick what we want to work on.
Exactly. I try to make sure that everyone goes on to something that they're passionate about. So, yeah, we've hammered this out in the past couple months and we've distributed our teams on mandates that would motivate them.
The buildings there are going to be crazy. All those buildings over there, maybe not all, but a lot of them will have content in them. We'll have some industrial, residential, commercial, rooftops, maybe sewer. We'll be able to connect each other, so we're going to add so much gameplay.
And holding cells, I think, like prisons.
Eventually, we're all looking at that. We're seeing what works, what doesn't, and yeah, we'll hammer out the proof of concept for this, and then we'll be doing a bunch of those.
Making a world more world.
And how about you? You get to have a vote.
Well, I'm really, really excited about the mandates that they just talked about. And yeah, we're going to have a lot more in the next year. I think you guys are aware that Montreal is ramping up the team. So we're going to take on more and more super exciting mandates. But sadly, I can't talk about all of them. So it'll be for next time I'm over. I can tell you guys about it.
I was going to add something. With the UGF, I think one thing that's going to be different, because all the other mandates we had were very local, everything was made in Montreal. So for the UGF, that's going to be one mandate where we're really going to work with the Manchester team.
More collaboration.
Yeah, a lot more collaboration. So it feels like we're becoming more and more part of the family, which is cool.
It's one of the initiatives of coming over here to meet those teams.
We would have to redo it from scratch.
Technology has already moved forward quite a bit since we touched that, but we can take that idea and put it in our back pocket and think about it in a while. But yeah, it would need some massive rework.
Because it was more of a proof of concept. And like Max said, it would probably have to be redone.
It worked with some camera angles, but the whole location, in terms of missions, it wasn't really thought out that way.
It's like a movie set.
You can just look at one side, but not the other side.
Yeah, if you push too hard, it's going to...
It was cool, though.
It looked great, but yeah, that's what it was. It was something to sink our teeth into when we arrived.
TL;DRStory and lore shape the work through close collaboration, with narrative involved early to build on concepts and placeholders, and sometimes the art team sends its own ideas to narrative.
I think we bring in the narrative team, we show them where we're at. For Lorville skyline in particular, we just show them where we're at in terms of placeholder, and then there's a branding, and telling them that this is the size of the city, these are the different areas that we have, and we need a little bit of variation in that. Then they go to work with that and they bring their ideas, too. And it's just a synergy.
Yeah, it's a healthy mix of both. I think we get the concept from the concept artist and then we work something out, and then we try to involve narrative as early as possible in the process so that they can have a first look and wrap their head around what we're trying to do. And then they always come up with the most wonderful ideas. So yeah, we try to meld everything together.
But sometimes the ideas come from us. We have ideas about crashes, why those crashes happen, and we can just send our ideas to narrative and they can just accept it and say, oh, yeah, we can do that.