The House of Tesla News

Hello friends, my name is Jana and among other things, my responsibility has been creating the lighting for The House of Tesla. I’m here to give you a peek into my take on the general workflow.

As you may have gathered from the previous devlogs, creating assets and assembling them into a playable chapter requires complex collaboration across the whole team. But the work doesn’t stop once the environment and gameplay is all put together in the game engine - this is where lighting comes in to unify everything into a cohesive visual experience.

My favorite role of lighting in games is creating the mood and visual narrative of the environment. A lighting workflow always begins with a clear idea of what kind of atmosphere a scene should have - a base color palette, the time of day, and even aspects of the story will drive the decisions behind initial blackouts.



Once we’re happy with the mood, we can start adding some fill lights and accents to brighten areas that need it. Top priority in this stage is to ensure overall readability and guide the player through deliberate placement of highlights and shadows.
Lighting is all about slowly building up in layers and trusting the process - even the most subtle of tweaks can greatly contribute to the final feel of the environment.



Finally, when we’re finished with the fill and accent lights, we can zoom in on key areas of the scene and add detail lighting. This is where we make sure to put focus on all the beautiful assets created by the 3D artists, catching all the reflections and hand-crafted detailing.
And, of course, we push the player’s eye toward visual cues and interactive parts of the level.



Then, the lighting is thoroughly examined during gameplay testing and iterated on. Once we can’t think of any more improvements, it will leave my hands to be optimized and properly implemented into the game.
Lighting up the beautifully crafted world of The House of Tesla has been such a rewarding journey. Thanks for taking this quick behind-the-scenes dive with me! There’s more where that came from! For now though enjoy this glamorous glow-up of our demo chapter, which I had the honor of contributing to.



Jana
3D/Lighting Artist
Blue Brain Games

Greetings, everyone! My name is Alina, I am one of the concept artists from The House of Tesla team, and today I would like to delve deeper into the processes surrounding my field of work.

As you may remember, my colleague Sari introduced you to the standard process of concept creation, where we receive text descriptions, a 3D block-out, or sometimes charming scribbles from our game designers, and can start concepting from there.
At times, however, game designers have an idea of the functionality of a puzzle - a kind of initial spark - but they need visual input from concept artists to help finalize their idea and crystallize the design. This form of collaboration is not typical, but it is refreshing and intriguing. We get to help design the puzzles themselves, and it is always motivating to work with people from different departments within an organic, evolving, and flexible process!



Alright, let’s now take a specific example from the game. Our game designers needed something that would function as a compact object enabling electrical connections between parts of a small electrical device. Sounds like PCBs (printed circuit boards), right? Yes, indeed! Only… there weren’t really such things during Tesla’s time! Not to worry, though - we can make this work!
As our main goal is to create believable, functioning and visually appealing concepts, we rely on research and historical evidence so that our players would feel that all of what we created could indeed be plausible.
Thus, we begin our dive into the world of possibilities (read: research and brainstorming). During this journey, we learn that although PCBs did not exist yet, there were viable alternatives, such as “breadboards” - wooden boards used as a base to connect electrical parts with copper wires; ceramic elements, like lightbulb sockets; and various brass terminals and switches. Here is a screenshot of part of the research moodboard:



After gathering all these references and ideas, we can now work out a concept for this intriguing item. We can use the available materials and arrange them in a way that fits the technology of the time. When coming up with such hypothetical designs, it is helpful (and fun!) to imagine yourself as Tesla, inventing new things, pushing science forward, proving to people that your ideas might work, but also staying close to what is actually possible. Here you can see some initial sketches based on the mentioned research:



Eventually, after some iterations and consultations, we present this research moodboard and concepts to the game designers. At this stage, they can start visualizing more specifically which elements they can use to create amazing puzzles. Once they have refined their ideas, they return to us with their wonderful charts and scribbles.



I hope you have enjoyed this detailed description of the concepting process. As I mentioned before, it is always refreshing to find new approaches to your work and collaborate with colleagues in new ways. This way, we can truly help each other bring our ideas to the next level. If you have not read the previous devlogs, do check them out, and stay tuned for more insights into our processes!

Alina
Concept Artist
Blue Brain Games

Hello everyone!

Today is the day to talk a bit more about our demo, what it means for us to make it, and whether it “pays off”. Last time I mentioned how we need to change or twist whole processes to be able to make a demo version. One part I haven’t mentioned yet but absolutely needs to be moved forward is the user interface.



That’s a lot of work, some of it for the design department (not as much as you might think though), and a lot of it for the concept art department. Someone also needs to finalize all the art and create an asset atlas, that will be called by the processes in the game and finally, someone needs to code everything about how the menus, cursors, and everything will behave. If you look at the pretty pictures, we included this time you can see a sliver of different stages and variants that we need to go through before the UI is ready (and mount Teide).



Now, if you were following our updates dutifully you might have noticed two interesting things:
a) The demo of our game came out as part of Steam Next Fest
b) Our devlog did not come out after Gamescom



Let me start with point b) I had a great vacation in the Canary Islands namely Tenerife: sun, beaches, cute animals, and mountain trekking. Look at how majestic Mount Teide looks (and forgive me for not putting out this devlog sooner, pls? ✨).



Now, let’s slowly forget there even was a point b) by focusing on its second part - Gamescom. Gamescom was a great experience for us. It was very hard and tiring work, but it was also great to see so many people enjoy our game and give direct feedback through both how they played the game and what they told us after. A lot of fans came to say hi and that was extremely motivating. It was also fun to see other indie devs and what they were working on in the bits of free time we had here and there.
Meanwhile, another part of our team was in the business section of Gamescom doing… well… business stuff, I guess. Not sure what to tell you about that but it was a great success all around for us. Thank you, guys.



As you might remember we had to fast-track our demo to be able to use it at Gamescom. The advantage was that we could just directly put our players into the middle of it and talk them through it. In the case of Next Fest, this is no longer possible as the demo needs to be completely stand-alone. We needed to finish all the menus, and basic functions of the options (so people can at least change their preferred language), we had to work with our localization team and give them all the required texts. Another part was to use some of the feedback from Gamescom to make the experience even better. But being part of Next Fest is also something new for us. So in the end it is an experiment… one that went very well.



During Next Fest more than 10k people played our demo. We received a lot of feedback. We had a lot of publicity thanks to streams and news articles. Many people added The House of Tesla to their Wishlist and our little community is just a little bit bigger thanks to all this. So, will we do something like this the next time around, even if it is hard and time-consuming? Absolutely. Also, if you haven’t but feel like it -> try our demo.

Until next time

Viktor
Lead Designer of The House of Tesla
Blue Brain Games

Are you excited to see what's new in The House of Tesla? We certainly hope so because we have some good news for you! You can now download the Demo of our upcoming game and play through the first, tutorial chapter.

Or you can join our talented concept artists, Sarianne and Alina, or our no less talented 3D artists Matěj and Fazil, and watch them play through the demo during our Developers Play live stream.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3171940/

Don't forget to add The House of Tesla to your Wishlist!

Hello everyone!

The new Dev Log just landed on The House of Da Vinci VR Steam page. There, Richard, our software architect and technical artist will tell you a little bit about the first research phase and technological decisions we needed to make before we went trough with making a VR game.

Feel free to head on to The House of Da Vinci VR Steam page and wishlist and/or follow the game to see more info as it comes out!

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2948310/view/4571804614849466109