[Background Blog] The Lian Shan Property Group

Hello everyone!

It's been a while but we've been hard at work on Nekojishi: Lin & Partners (and another project which will be the feature of our next blog) so this time we wanted to give you a look at the latest environment we've been working on behind the scenes.

While seen briefly in the announcement trailer for the game, the Lian Shan Property Group serves as the main opponent to Liao and the cats in the game.

As with all our environments it starts out as a layout sketch which lays out the scene and the assets required to build it. Above you can see the entrance floor to the property group's office. (Quite a bit fancier than the little home office of Lin & Partners.)

From there a blocky greybox is put together to get an idea about how the scene is constructed. In the above case the scene doesn't have any walls because it's in the middle of a skyscraper so glass walls will be put in place further down the track.

And once the greybox is finalised, the modeller can begin working on the various assets required for the scene.

So the process for asset creation begins with the concept artist designing artwork of the props to be used in the scene.

These are then passed onto the modeller who models the geometry, textures the object, and places example objects in the scene. There's usually a lot of back and forth on the elements to get them looking just right. (If you're wondering about the character's eyes, our modeller has some graphics settings set incorrectly on his end so they don't render properly)

Now we can't reveal too much about the scenario for this area, but the main idea is that someone has to infiltrate this office so a lot of the objects for this area are designed around that scenario.

One important thing about making assets for games is that we need to be creative about making things that can easily be reused throughout a scene and the entire game itself. After all doing so is a benefit to not only time and resources but performance and disk space. Offices are thankfully a great resource for such items.

Now this scene is definitely still a work in progress as we're mostly in the asset construction phase but we hope you enjoy this look into the asset and scene creation process for Nekojishi: Lin & Partners.

As we've backloaded this month's background blogs a bit again, we'll be releasing another one soon about the Astatos video game that was announced as a part of one of the stretch goals for that Kickstarter last year. (While Beek 2 ahead a little bit in the poll we have a lot more blog-able content ready for the Astatos game so we'll be shuffling that blog to next month)

Also along with this post, we'll be putting some more concept artwork for this scene for our World Tourist tier patrons. 

See you soon!

- Studio Klondike