Dev Diary #344 - The Art of The Machine Age (Part II: Art Blast Edition)
Strap in to your acceleration couches, this one's a going to be a big one. - E
Hello there!
I’m Anton, the Art Manager & Producer on Stellaris, and I would like to welcome you all to this absolute monster of a Dev Diary we have prepared for you!
I just want to use this opportunity to mention how amazing it is to work with these fantastic artists on a day to day basis and how extremely proud I am of the team.
We managed to do a lot for this DLC, more than we’ve done for an expansion or DLC ever before.
In fact the total logged art work time (I just looked at our stats in JIRA) for The Machine Age is over 2 years and 41 weeks.
Truly spectacular. Great job Team!
In the last The Art of The Machine Age dev diary, we showed you (and talked about the process of) a lot of what we had been doing - but far from it all.
So get comfortable, take out your favorite snack and get ready to look at a lot of art. Almost everything we did for The Machine Age will be showcased - but first, some words from our Art Director.
Alright! Here we go! We hope you enjoy this!
[h3]Scott Austin - Art Director[/h3]
As you have heard countless times already, our latest project, The Machine Age, is the largest pack we’ve ever put out for Stellaris. The reason that you’ve heard it countless times is because we think it’s worth repeating. We have well over double the amount of ships and FX, triple the amount of characters and animation, and probably quadruple the amount of 2D/Icon work. As daunting as that might seem, we pulled it off. And not just pulled it off, but did it without losing any quality and with an unbelievably tight schedule. Sure things were busy, but we can proudly say that we didn’t have to burn the midnight oil or resort to overtime or crunch.
While I would love, as the AD, to just take credit for all of that hard work and bask in the amazing light of glorious praise, the real credit goes to our “Little Art Team That Could”.
In the boundless expanses and the incomprehensibly infinite universe of game design, our small art team shines like a supernova of talent and efficiency. Though few in number, our art team possesses a galaxy's worth of skill and dedication, crafting the most awe-inspiring sci-fi visuals that breathe life into every pixel, every polygon and every frame of Stellaris.
Each artist possesses a bewildering array of talents, with skills so sharp they could slice through space-time, creating shortcuts to other dimensions where deadlines don't exist and cups of caffeinated beverages never run dry. They churn out masterpieces with such alarming speed and regularity that one begins to suspect they've cloned themselves and are operating in shifts spanning multiple parallel universes (Please, do not let HR in on this…).
I am ever thankful for the chance to voyage through the cosmos of Stellaris with such brilliantly unhinged minds. Their talent and relentless dedication are the warp drive to our projects, and their visionary artistry is the very soul of our games. I am ever grateful for their dedication and downright chuffed to navigate the nebulous realms of creativity alongside such splendidly imaginative life forms.
Together, we continue to chart courses that boldly go where no game has gone before. And, as always, to the players, I say: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
-Scott Austin-
Art Director, Paradox Interactive
[Note from your friendly Stellaris Community Ambassador: Steam will not allow us to include all 150+ images the Art Team has shared in this Dev Diary, so please visit the Paradox forums if you want to see it all!]
[h3]Alec Beals - Concept Artist[/h3]
Cybernetic Portraits
Synthetic Portraits
The Synthetic Queen
[h3]Lloyd Drake-Brockman - Concept Artist[/h3]
Illustrations
Super Structures & The Synthetic Queen Ships Concepts
The Machine Age Ship Concepts
[h3]Felix Englund - Concept Artist[/h3]
Cybernetic Portraits
Cybernetic Portraits - Part II
Synthetic Portraits
Illustrations
Concept Art - Ships
[h3]Tim Wiberg - 3D Artist[/h3]
Cybernetics Ship Set
Machines Ship Set
[h3]Emma Quer - 3D Artist[/h3]
Cybernetics Ship Set
Machines ship set
The Synthetic Queen Ships
[h3]David Strömblad Lindh - 3D Artist[/h3]
Cybernetics Ship Set
[h3]Erik Forsström - VFX Artist[/h3]
[Stellaris CA note: the GIFs that go here are too pretty to compress to fit Steam image limits; go look at them on the forums or click through to Erik's ArtStation page.]
[h3]Erick Ramirez Mota - Animator[/h3]
Stellaris - The Machine Age - Animations
[h3]Cassandra Lindquist - UI Artist[/h3]
Achievements, Technologies, Buildings, Authorities, Traits & Civics
The Ruler Chip Relic
Synthetic Fertility Event Image
[h3]Gabrielle Rodrigues - UI Artist[/h3]
The Machine Age UI Art - The Synaptic Lathe
The Machine Age UI Art - Cosmogenesis Crisis
The Machine Age UI Art - Tradition Trees, Achievements and Misc
[h3]Ingela Hallberg - UI Artist[/h3]
Building Icons - Part I
Building Icons - Part II
[h3]Let’s Talk About AI[/h3]
Eladrin here. There has been an ongoing discussion about the responsible use of AI tools in game development.
As mentioned in our Steam AI generated content disclosure, during the development of The Machine Age the Stellaris team used text and image generative AI tools for ideation purposes to inspire creativity in a developer, or to aid in explaining a designer’s intent to other members of the development team. We subscribe to the legal opinion that there is no copyright or ownership attached to the output of generative AI, and our team is disallowed from putting any such generated text or image directly into the game.
[h3]Everything you see or read in The Machine Age has been created, developed, or written by our creative staff in the Studio.[/h3]
We have used an advanced text-to-speech AI tool to create a voice for Cetana and the Cyberpunk advisor. The scripts and lines for these voices were created by our Content Design team, and the voice actors that created any voice models that are used by this tool receive payment for each line generated, and will continue to receive payments if more lines are generated using their voice models in the future. The use of this tool allowed our Audio team (with quite a bit of effort as described in Dev Diary #340) to fully voice Cetana, and will allow us to keep the advisor voice up-to-date should new mechanics be added to Stellaris over the upcoming years. This will prevent the voice from needing to fall back to the default VIR voice, as many of our other advisors did when Galactic Paragon added Council Agendas.
These technologies are evolving quickly, and personally I have great hopes for further improvements and potential uses of this text-to-speech technology in particular. In the 3.6 “Orion” update we added support for text-to-speech in events as a major accessibility improvement, but currently it is limited to the use of operating system based voice packs. While these audio tools are not yet at a point where we can use this technology to improve that experience, I look forward to a day some years from now where AI-based advanced text-to-speech could replace these relatively crude voices with more thematically appropriate ones, and be able to better handle languages other than English.
[h3]Next Week[/h3]
Next week we’ll be looking at post-release support, and may have a preliminary list of release notes for the next planned patch.
See you then!