Destroying What You Build news

One of the best things about building a world I find is making it look like it could actually exist. You can spend hours alone on just looking for inspirational material that get your creative juices flowing, whether you are creating a house, a road, a building or an entire city. The internet is full of images and inspirational designs that can help you along the way. But with OverDose, we have to go one
step further. Obviously like any other game we need to build the world we want to play in, but OverDose has a small catch... Once you build it, you gotta destroy it. See, in OverDose, the world is left in ruin. Hundreds of years of nuclear war has left the planet scared and down right disgusting. Walls are decaying, metal is rusted, and resources are limited. As you can see in our first shot, we are trying to make the world look lived in, old, damaged. Tin cans and debris line the floor, boxes and junk clutter the halls, walls are broken to the extent of revealing what’s behind them. All of these make the world look decayed:

Another area that really works well when creating such a theme is working with decals. Decals are strips of texture that are blended over where needed to give extra detail. Notice how around trims, edges and metal we add a small layer of dirt and rust? This helps break up the blandness of a wall so that instead of a door just appearing from nowhere, it actually looks set into the wall:

Damage isn't confined to the walls. Floors and ceilings are another great area where you can make things look lived in. Would a tile floor survive after years of life? They hardly last a decade these days, so wouldn't they crumble too?

Finally, a great way to enhance a lived in feel for a level is to add a lot of clutter. Boxes, crates, bottles, cans, pipes etc all work well to make a level look like its part of a world. Every item tells a back story and just enhances the feel of your world even more:

There are so many things you can do with a world to make it look post apocalyptic, destroy walls leading into other rooms, create blood smeared walls and floors with bullet holes and casings that hint at past battles, burn and scar materials in your world, set fire to things to create dynamic lighting etc Anything is possible these days, and the more you think up, the more believable your world becomes.

I hope this latest sneak peak has given a little more insight into where OverDose is heading and the art direction we are taking. As always, comments are welcome, so please ask any questions you like and the team will try and get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks for reading.