World Design and Inspirations

In the world of DROS, each stage would be a discrete architectural island floating in space. The player could then explore the stage, discover its secrets and solve puzzles by spinning it and scrutinising it from every angle, vertically and horizontally. In a Virtual Reality space the same could be achieved by literally walking around the stage and peering into it.

Games such as Monument Valley and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker have explored ideas like this to great effect. I was keen to see where we could take this idea in our own game world.

Earliest inspiration came from architecture and sculpture. In particular the Brutalist concrete sculptures of David Uemoto served as a good jumping off point. Having studied architecture, I had always loved the surreal illustrations of Lebbeus Woods, showing strange, yet somehow familiar pieces of architecture suspended in mid-air.

A crowd favourite amongst game designers, M.C. Escher’s work is always fun to have on one’s screen when designing environments such as this. Games such as the Monument Valley series have drawn heavily from his work and DROS stage designs also took inspiration from prints such Waterfall.

Having been a long-time Manga fan , I also looked to the pages of Tsutomu Nihei’s amazing series ‘Blame’. In Blame, the protagonists wander through a monolith Dyson-spere-like space inside of which the remnants of the human race live in squalor. This was a great inspiration when trying to imagine our Tower as a huge void-like space inside of which the various stages of our game took place.

Conceptually, the tower comprises of  7 areas, rising one above the other. Each would be mapped to the 7 levels of alchemy and would take reference visually from this process. Lower levels would start deep and dirty and dark and gradually rise up to the higher areas of the tower. The tower itself drew inspiration from a number of sources. The art of Stanislav Szukalski, Peter Gric and the Tower of Babel. Basically, it needed to be huge and monolithic.

One of the first stages to be designed was the ‘Catchment’ which would serve as the starting point of the game, at the base of the tower where sewers flowed. Firstly, mood and lighting concepts were painting to gauge the general direction.

The stage masses would reference back to the original idea of discrete floating chunks of architecture in a space. Styling would reference steampunk sources as well as dark fantasy films such as Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. The goal was to shoot for a look that was dark and moody yet still retained a whimsy and charm in its simplicity and styling. Like if Tim Burton directed a mario game!

Following from this, a more game-ready concept was created. To satisfy a limited scope, the stages would need to be constructed using a modular approach. This would involve a base geometry pass using ProBuilder supplemented by props made in Blender. Textures would use the PBR pipeline.

Stay tuned for the next blog update where we start translating some of the above into early 3D mockups in Unity.