Early pre-production sketches by Eno, (2019).

Generally it’s considered best practice during prototyping for the art to be done in a separate pipeline, to work on top of “cubes that play well”.

Meanwhile, the art iterations are about exploring the total possibility space of what this game could be, what it could look like.

Godot Engine Programmer Evans (Giiba) calls this the “sea of cubes”. The point is maximum readability, and programmers to not need to wait for art.

That does not mean the work is kept in separate silos until the last minute however. It’s more about the ability for devs closer to the engine side to use cubes, capsules, untextured assets. The scenes load fast so we can keep iterating on gameplay.

This week, @tracefree@mastodon.gamedev.place worked on pathing! “Pathing” refers to the path followed by workers of the shipyard (yardies) as they go about their daily tasks. This is important to give a feeling of lively, busy shipyard.

Tune in next week for updates on shipbuilding UI! Here is a sneak peek: