Below Decks at Ghost Ship: Designing the Reclaimers' Gauntlets

[h2]Hello Reclaimers,[/h2]

It’s time to talk about TECHNOLOGY.

Perhaps you saw our post yesterday on April 1st, teasing the new Reclaimer gauntlets. If the date alone did not clue you in, that video is an April Fools’ goof. It’s pre-rendered footage, not in-game or in-engine, and nothing in it besides the gauntlets is going into the game.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The video was initially meant to be a simple little showcase of the Reclaimer gauntlets for this Below Decks article. But as often happens at GSG, we had a lot of silly ideas and no grown-ups were around to tell us to knock it off. Thus, a goofy video was born. Buried among those goofs, however, are some pretty cool aspects of art direction and animation that deserve a more serious discussion.

So it’s time to take a look at the design process behind some of the fancy new gear you’ll be able to use in Rogue Core. This is more than a showcase of neat tech, though. It’s also an exploration of visual language and art direction in computer games. How do you get a cluster of pixels to stir up the feelings you’re after?

Let’s get into it.

RECLAIMER DISCLAIMER: Everything below is a work in progress. We can’t promise that all (or any) of it will make it into the game exactly as it’s described here. This is just to give you a look at what we’re working on at the moment.

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[h3]Dress code tactical[/h3]

Early discussions about Rogue Core’s Reclaimers established them as a sort of elite “shock troop” in the employ of Deep Rock Galactic, with a more military essence than your working miners. It’s only natural that they’d have access to an arsenal of more advanced, high-tech equipment.

But what exactly should that look like?

One of the critical parts of art direction in the early phase of development was nailing down some central design principles for the game’s visuals. These help us capture the look and feel we want, but also to make sure everything in the game seems like a convincing part of the same world.

Casper Olsen is a 2D/3D artist at Ghost Ship Games, whose main focus these past months has been designing equipment and weapons for the Reclaimers. As he explains, there’s an important balancing act in making Rogue Core visually distinct enough to stand out as its own game, but still having it all fit into the DRG low-poly universe.

“The Reclaimers’ gear departs from the DRG aesthetics, which tends to be blocker and more cubic,” Casper says. “We’re obviously keeping the low-poly design philosophy, but we’re going for a sleeker look here, more triangular and pointy. It’s a lot like modern stealth tech, but more flashy and sci-fi.”

Like Casper says, the art team took a lot of design cues from stealth jets and naval vessels. A good example is the weapons bay on a fighter jet like the F-22: a sleek, seamless form that can expand and separate, exposing faceted edges and a mess of high-tech gear within.

Casper’s first challenge was figuring out how to translate that look into the DRG universe. To do that, he started with a style statement: a piece of gear that captures all the principles we’ve been talking about, and demonstrates how they’d work In-game.

That statement piece ended up being the Barrier Drone, a portable piece of tech deployed at the start of each mission to open up the Grayout Barrier enclosing the mine sites and allow the Reclaimers to pass through. The drone was something of a test platform, as its design and animations helped set the tone for the Reclaimers and the rest of their gear.

The team liked the Drone, which was Casper’s green light to move on. Next up: the Reclaimers’ gauntlets.



[h3]The gear makes the dwarf[/h3]

Each Reclaimer’s got their own gauntlet, which is a wrist-mounted weapon with a special ability. As a class-specific item, it’s got an important role in defining the character.

After all, this piece of kit is almost always in your field of view because it’s strapped to your arm. It’s the most consistent visual reminder of who you are. It shouldn’t be so flashy that it hogs the spotlight, but when you do activate it, it should make a clear statement of who your character is and what you’re about. It’d be a missed opportunity if this equipment didn’t telegraph that information in an interesting way.

But what does the gear need to say? Well, here’s our aims and inspirations for the four current playable classes in Rogue Core:

• Guardian: Tanky shield character. Everything about the Guardian ought to be chunky, bulky and robust, focused on power over speed.
  
• Spotter: More techy, nimble and tacticool. As a character focused on weakening and critical damage, it makes sense to emphasize precision tech and stealthiness.
  
• Falconeer: Deploys a sweet robotic bird drone. Casper looked at the real-life clothes of Mongolian eagle hunters, and adapted that for sleek futuristic tech.
  
• Slicer: “His energy sword is just a complete dazzle of busy bullsh*t,” Casper says. “I looked at mech animes for that. They’ve got all sorts of tech that makes no sense at all, but looks amazing.”
  

Gauntlets for each current Reclaimer class, clockwise from top left: Guardian, Spotter, Falconeer, Slicer.


As you can see, cool comes in many different flavors. And each character’s equipment and animations have to reflect their unique type of cool.

"When these abilities are so central to your character, the equipment needs to be more than just a gun that goes ‘pew’. I wanted them to have more juice than that,” Casper says. “As a player, this equipment should 'reward' you with a ton of snappy movements and cool tech when you use it. There should be a sort of catharsis each time, like ‘Aw yeah, finally I can use my ability again, this looks sweet.’”

Making you say ‘Hell yeah’ is an important goal with this stuff, but all this design has a direct gameplay purpose as well: when your equipment is interesting and satisfying to use, it rewards you for using it as often as possible, thereby encouraging you to play to your character’s strengths.

And to reinforce that reward feedback, it’s not enough to look the part. The gear has to sound the part too.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Shape, sound and motion[/h3]

Designing the gear to fit the character is just the first step. After that, there’s the question of making sure it moves and sounds how you’d expect.

We’ve got instinctive expectations for how certain objects should feel. You’ve probably played a game where you pick up some heavy weapon like a sledgehammer, but you’re able to swing it around like it’s filled with helium. Something’s off. If an object’s animations don’t convey the right sense of weight and heft, it starts to feel out of place.

So if our Guardian is a blocky, tanky shield character, how do those qualities need to shine through in his gear, and how it moves? How do you run when you’re wearing chunky power armor, as opposed to lightweight boots? Casper has to run through different considerations with each character.

"One thing is coming up with the design and making a 3D model, but there's also figuring out how they move, how snappy, what shape they fold out into. Is there a windup, like a minigun or a big laser? Or is this quick and sharp, like flicking out a switchblade?”

While he puts his animations together, he also does some rudimentary sound design to go with them. It’s placeholder stuff, nothing that’ll make it in the final game. But the rough blockout gives Ghost Ship Games’ sound designers a specific idea of the feeling we’re aiming for. For Casper, the design process needs to consider shape, sound and motion all together.

"Designing this stuff needs to give us a holistic understanding of how the gear works, how it feels, and how the player's ability fits into the game design. It's this interplay of the movement of the character itself, and their gear,” he says. “All these small parts add up to support what kind of character this is supposed to be."



[h3]The Rule of Cool[/h3]

Casper’s design philosophy follows The Rule of Cool: “If it looks cool but doesn’t necessarily make sense in real life, who cares. It just needs to look cool.”

He spends a lot of time looking at real-world guns, often pulling up a Forgotten Weapons video or some other clip from Gun Youtube while he works. But these videos are more for artistic inspiration than technical reference. He’s got the 3D model of the Spotter’s wrist-mounted dart gun on his monitor, running the loading/firing animation and wiggling his mouse around to pick apart individual components. “If you look real close at how all these parts fit together, nothing would work in real life. But that’s not really what I’m going for here.”

You might think of each animated component as a little performer in a choreographed dance. Each little part needs to tell you, the player, about what’s happening: The gun is activating, rounds are being loaded in the chamber, the weapon is ready to fire. It’s about symbolism, not true function. Visual dazzle and crisp, expressive animations and sound design are much more effective ways to communicate this than whatever might be most realistic.

We talked about this a while back in the world of sound design. The classic example there is taking a sword out of a sheath – in real life, it’s basically silent. But it’s a lot cooler if you give it that schhing! sound effect you hear in games and movies.

At the end of the day, all these design considerations boil down to creating the gun that feels right, not the one that’s technically correct. Again, Casper points to the Rule of Cool.

“A lot of times, games will have all these cool fantasy guns, and then there’s always guys in the Youtube comments being like, ‘uh, this gas system doesn’t make sense’ or whatever. Who cares man, it’s sci-fi. Let’s just have some fun with it.”


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Want more Rogue Core? We’re premiering a brand-new trailer at the Triple-I Initiative on April 10th. Hope to see you there.

Also, if there’s something you’d like to explore in the next Below Decks, let us know in the comments below. Rock and Stone!