City of Steam Developer Journals - Art 2012 02 11 news

Art Dev Journal

For this edition of the Art Development Journal we’ve got five robots, Greaser, Sear, Shoveller, Choke and Bolter. We call these kind of robots ‘grinders’ and you’ll find quite a lot throughout City of Steam. Each has their own personality and habits, their own reactions to adventurers coming upon them and their own style and yet there is a lot to be said there. It’s a big task starting from a glimmer of an idea, describing it, conceptualizing it, editing those concepts, adding this, retracting that, and sure, sometimes failing at arriving at what was expected at the start. It’s all about learning, and there’s been a good deal of that with these five. How, to speak from an example, does a person hear “I want you to make a robot that likes spent engine oil,” and from that arrive at an ideal representation of it in the final product of Greaser? The answer to that is: Patience, communication and a “try and try again” attitude (maybe a little talent, too).

These are robots who reflect the world that birthed them: Take Greaser who waves around a menacing drill bit; Smear who has a small boiler for a body and a fiery red mane atop his head. Choke, who bounds around and when it meets its foe launches itself away only to come crashing back with a shockwave that is sure to leave anyone a little bewildered. Bolter is a robot driven by electrochemistry that fire off in a display of dazzling electrical shocks that, while beautiful, are all too literally shocking.

Shoveller is a bit of an oddity, without the common human shape that so many of its kin are designed with, instead finds its footing prowling around on all Threes. With the oddity that this produced our development team knew they couldn’t stop stop there, taking on the task of creating Choke, and if three legs wasn’t enough they decided this one needed three menacing arms!

Everyone had a great time coming up with this interesting quintet with the possible exception of Guy, our animator, who scratched his head more than once when presented with the challenge of working out how a three-legged metal monstrosity gets around. How often it is that in the design process one can look to nature for the answers… Want to know how to make something with six-legs move: Look to the cockroach. How about a ghastly creature with a hundred legs? Look to the loathsome centipede (now we checked and it seems centipedes don’t always live up to their namesake. We research this type of thing. We are very serious about…Appendage Science…apparently) And so on. It was a real chore speculating, conceiving and then implementing Shoveller and Choke but we think it turned out really awesome.

Choke:

Shoveler

Greaser

Smear

Bolter

Check out this Unity Project to get a sense of each of these industrial age robots. If you haven’t installed Unity yet you’re really missing out on this one!

Anecdotal footnote!

There was a lot of laughter in the office as Guy asked other members of the team to mimic the movements of our three-legged friends. We’ll leave it up to your imaginations to picture a group of men and women sitting (standing, and sometimes, awkwardly “walking” if it can be called that) around the office having long-winded conversations about joint movement frequencies, what moves where, edges there and sways here. The delicate intricacies involved in answering questions about whether there is a harmonic asymmetry or clambering chaos with each step.

At last, though, Dave decided on something that fit well.

The result? Play the game and find out for yourself. (We can’t give it all away) Have some ideas? Head over to the forum and give us some ideas.

Head to our developer journal page to find out more.