Interstellar Marines: SITREP - Week 010 news

We've nailed a few ITO Training Ground concept drawings in the past, but just have to dig down again getting our hands dirty with everything to make sure that we plot our ambitious course on achieving the right type of setting, mood and canvas for our continued journey into Project IM (Starting with Deadlock). To move this conceptual work forward on the art creation side of things, I'm extremely happy to announce that Andreas Von Cotta our old GURU conceptual artist is back on the team working freelance (Back after having worked about a year at CCP on Iceland).

I won't miss the noise of three servers by my side (as if Kim and Nics' vocal noise factor aren't enough...).

Despite inadvertently having spent wayyy too much time on this, there's a few upsides: a) We've got a proper backup procedure now (redundancy FTW!), b) Potential downtime will be much much shorter in the future, c) Old server software has been updated and last but not least d) We've freed up a bunch of disk space for production use.

So this concludes the chapter on "get your infrastructure straight, mister!". I (and the rest of the team!) can finally get back to 110% dedicated Deadlock development.

The challenge for me regarding Deadlock is to stage the maps in relation to the setting of the underground training facility. The main issue is to make it believable while at the same time making it visually interesting and engaging. Most shooters create multiplayer maps based on various settings from the singleplayer campaign. This means that you have the benefit having a visually rich environment with a lot of props implied by the setting.

The challenge with the training scenario of Deadlock (where all the multiplayer games is part of the overall story as the training of the marines) is that settings created for such training would probably be rather scarce on props that would add detail. For example: Why would there be a lot of exposed cables hanging from the ceiling or lying on the floor in this training facility? Why would there be monitors and computers along the walls? Etc. In order for the rooms and battle arenas to work gameplay-wise you need to put something in them to create cover and hiding spots but it can’t all be crates as this would make for a very dull and uniform map.

Besides currently spending time trying to dig a music composing hole of creative solitude for the next period of time I have also started to play around with the audio part in the Unity engine. It's been a while since I last worked with in-game sound design (back in the UE3) but the team has big faith in my skills to adapt to this engine".