We work with specialized offsite contractors which means we can get exactly who we want to work on each piece of art, but requires more feedback and iteration. In this videocast, NS2 Art Director Cory Strader describes this revision and feedback process, illustrated with the "hive" model created by that fantastic Marcus Dublin as a case study.
Thanks to Jon Finger who filmed this (in HD this time!) and put the video together afterwards.
Let us know what you think!
In their 10-year anniversary since the release of Half-life, ModDB rated Natural Selection the #1 non-commercial mod for Half-life!
That trailer brings back great memories. Thanks guys!
We talked about the mobile automated siege cannon (or "MASC") in Videocast #4 a little while ago and wanted to give you an update with the final artwork.
Cory iterated through quite a few different concepts and settled on this one:
Because we're a small team of four and we can't do everything in the game in-house, we decided to outsource the creation of this model to a great off-site artist. His job was to create a detailed model using less than 10,000 polies. Here's what he came up with (click the magnifying glass after zooming to get the very high resolution version):
We think he really nailed the concepts, that they are faithful to the look and we're quite happy with them. We think our new work arrangement together will speed up our art process considerably.
Natural Selection v1.0 was released on Halloween of 2002, so this Halloween marks the 6th year anniversary of NS!
It's sometimes hard for me to believe we've been focused on this fictional little universe for so long but I've loved (almost) every minute of it.
Thanks for sticking around and making it all worthwhile.
P.S. This just in! Hypergrip (who made much of the music in Natural Selection) created "Spirits of Sanjii" as a birthday present for NS. He said it was inspired by the NS2 concept art. Enjoy!
As you may have noticed, NS "classic" mode was crashing last week. This happened when the Commander entered or left the command station and was causing all sorts of problems. This was due to an engine update that was released on Steam last week.
Thanks to Puzl, Alfred, Valve and various community members, the issue has been fixed and released on Steam so everything should be back to normal.