Stylizing a Sci-Fi Frontier

[p][/p][p][/p][p]Adam Volker has worked in games and animation for 13 years. He worked briefly in AAA games at BioWare and Midway as a concept artist. Then, art directed the short film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore, which won an Academy Award in 2012. He was nominated for an Emmy in 2018 for Manifest 99, a narrative VR experience. Now he works at Soft Rains creating narrative and mechanically peculiar games while trying to make them as pretty as possible.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Ambrosia Sky is set on colonies built on the back of asteroids nestled in the rings of Saturn. It’s about Dalia, a Scarab. Familiar with death, a scientist enlisted to cure humanity’s mortality on her return journey home. Our Narrative Director, Kait Tremblay, had built this incredible world in their head. I felt like my job was to distill the parts that needed to shine for the player and make them real.[/p][p]When players pick up the controller to play what you’ve made, you have an opportunity to spark their imagination, to show them a world they haven’t thought of, and if you’re lucky, inspire them to make something and pay it forward. Good art is cumulative.[/p][p][/p][p]I strive to create a distinctive style for each project. There are centuries of brilliant 2D art to be found. So many styles to explore that artists before me have expressed in paint (digital or otherwise). What haven’t I tried to translate into 3D yet? Just as importantly, what’s cool looking? What sounds fun to try!? I pick one or two strong references for myself and the 2D team to dissect, understand, and internalize. Then we “method act” our paintings, using the tools taught to us by other painters and render objects from our unique world with those rules. The painting below is me trying to paint the large graphic shapes from our references with details inside, and design a building unique to our colony.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]You can try, but you can’t erase your own way of painting; it’s a beautiful thing about creating anything. Everyone has a style, whether they paint or not. Even as our concept team tries to emulate the style of the specific references I’ve chosen, we trust the process to produce something wholly unique. It’s a fun exercise to start each project by combining simple, strong references and my own precious biases. (haha)[/p][p]To get us started and to help direct the team towards what I’m aiming for, I made this spectrum and placed our goal on it. The two axes, one for the design of objects and the other for the final rendering style, helped us define what we wanted the word stylized to mean.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]It’s a pet peeve of mine the way our industry uses the word “stylized” to describe non-realistic visuals. For our Ambrosia Sky, we wrote our own definition. There is so much media out there that is really good, and if you have the appetite, even more after that. It’s 2025 now. We drink from a visual firehose. It means the chance to surprise people when you actually get their attention is special. We only get so many at bat.[/p][p][/p][p]I was looking for painterly detail, rendered inside graphic forms. A stylized world where colour choices weren’t literal, and subverted expectations of what outer space might look like. I feel like every year, our photographs of space bring back new colours, new textures that were there and we didn’t see before. It’s still such a big mystery what’s out there. We had to try to represent visually more than we know now. For instance, we designed our airlock door to spin as a sphere instead of opening on a hinge. Why not?![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Our game features vast, desolate spaces filled with fungus. Part of our game involved giant, dead space creatures so that we could dip our toes into the realm of fantasy. But at the end of the day, to hold the gravity of our story that is about death and life’s finality, the game needed to be credible. The world needed to make sense and had to have a rich amount of detail. Even if it was stylized. Shared language is crucial when trying to establish a unique style for a game. Despite our sophistication in design, not everyone thinks of the same references in the same way.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]The visual language of any project should be built alongside the story of the world, reinforce the gameplay and highlight the themes of the idea. Production design involves translating a theme into a visual language, being specific about details, and adhering to a concept throughout the entire production. It’s a question and answer. What designs support Dalia’s journey? How do we make a maximalist game about fungus legible?[/p][p][/p][p]Ysabel painted this; she is one of the most talented painters I’ve worked with. She put mood, design, organized colour, stylized brushstrokes AND story all into this image. This was a milestone painting for articulating the game. When she painted this, we hadn’t started building out our 3D kit for the game yet. This piece was a north star then, and still is one I return to, reminding me how the game should feel.[/p][p][/p][p]Concept art is for iterating, it’s for exploring. A good piece of art inspires the team’s imagination to create the game depicted in the picture, but concept art is a promise. After a few months of painting the building blocks, it was time to translate it into engine. We had some influences, a clear distinction of what we were after, and a huge stockpile of lore, character writing, and themes to draw from. Now we had to climb the mountain.[/p][p][/p][p]We filled in the corners of the world with paintings. Built a design language for the technology, and layered in history for different ages of architecture. Another huge challenge of the project was the life form Dalia encounters when she finally lands on the Cluster. The exo fungus.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Malicious space fungus that has overgrown the living spaces, airlocks, and facilities of her hometown. This was not only a set piece of our gross, dead, derelict world, but also the core of the gameplay. To uncover the truth about what happened to her friends and loved ones, Dalia must face a mutating, growing enemy by cleaning it away.[/p][p][/p][p]Each fungus has its own gameplay parameters, behaviour and interaction with the world. As Dalia learns what it does, we as players do too. It needed to be awful and beautiful. Gross and alluring.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We settled on high visual density, but not high detail. Graphic shapes everywhere, simple colours. Players needed to walk into a busy room, find what they were looking for immediately, assess the danger level in a room quickly and plan their route around it. With everything glowing, growing, and fighting for your attention, we chose to make each fungus’s shape design unique, individualize the colours between them, and keep the silhouettes strong so players wouldn’t be overwhelmed by what they saw.[/p][p][/p][p]The final challenge was turning the art we’d painted into an explorable 3D space. The design of the forms was straightforward. Build something big and flat to grow fungus on top of, easy. Making it feel painterly was harder. It took us several iterations and a lot of open-minded experimentation, but we got there. I think the game looks beautiful.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Please wishlist the game on Steam, join our community Discord, follow us on social media, and, of course, download the demo to get your first hands-on experience with Ambrosia Sky.[/p]