Some people commented on the Natural Selection 2 concept image that Charlie slipped into the end of his GDC presentation slides, so we figured we'd give you the full-resolution image and a little bit of background on this great concept illustration by Cory Strader.
As we've mentioned here before (and many of you probably already know) Cory is the one man army that defined style and directed the art team for Natural Selection 1. He did all of the concepts and textures for the original, so we're always grateful we he can spare some time help out with Natural Selection 2.
In Cory's words:
The way it would work (in the NS universe, not so much the actual model itself) is that it would be it's own little office environment, with computer terminal work stations with their own adjustable AC/heat system and monitoring systems. The whole pod would be very adjustable -- the legs could be extended, or even a whole set of legs and computer stations added on, the computer station arm could move and extend, it could be used with chairs or without, etc. The sketches show different ways in which it could be used in a map-- in a room as a single pod; many put together to create an "office" environment; or suspended in the air over a catwalk to be accessed that way.
Here are the other quick sketches Cory did of this prop:
As you can see, more thought goes into the concept of complex prop like this than is strictly necessary to build it. To make sure that it will be reusable, it's necessary to think about different circumstances in which the prop might be placed. This also helps to flesh out some of the background of the prop and helps us to fit it into the NS universe.
We don't have a color full painting for every piece that's going into the game, but doing several of these fully fleshed out images for each environment really helps define the style and the look of the textures, and gives a lot of direction and ideas to the artists building props and textures. More of those will be coming soon!
It was nearly the last slot on the last day of the Game Developers conference, and everyone was doubtless worn-out and craving the security and simplicity of their computer monitors (or was that just me?) but many of you came to my talk on Bootstrapping Core through Casual. It was a small room, but it was completely packed and people were standing in the back (I think there were about 175 people).
Much to my surprise, at least half the people in the room had played Natural Selection. I think many folks were more interested in NS than casual but I hope the talk was useful anyways! We were hoping to show off some new gameplay footage of Natural Selection 2 but weren't able to get that quite done in time.
There were some great questions afterwards and I got an overall good feeling from folks who seemed to enjoy hearing about our ups and downs. Thanks to everyone that attended and wanted to hear our story! I hope it helped. One person asked about how to see which are the current top-selling titles in Casual, and Tami Borowick from Real contributed this URL. It would've been nice to see that before starting Zen.
Many thanks to Max, Cory, Dan and Lee for making this talk possible!
