Hi guys! I’m Dom, programmer at Spiral Circus, and I’m really excited to share the news that our surreal underwater adventure Silt is coming to PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on June 1.
Silt is a puzzle adventure set deep within an ocean abyss where you play as a lone diver who searches the depths and explores treacherous waters to uncover forgotten mysteries. long forgotten. But the diver has a secret. Harnessing an unusual power, you’ll be able to possess sea creatures that roam the ocean voids, discovering new creatures and using their unique abilities to solve puzzles, traverse environment and go deeper into the dark.
With just a few weeks to go, we wanted to share one of the processes we’ve developed to bring our artist Tom’s traditional print-on-paper artwork from still images. into the interactive game world.
From pen and ink drawings to game content
Bringing Tom’s artwork into the game will be the biggest technical challenge for us. The point is that the game looks like one of Tom’s paintings and not like his artwork has been transplanted from the setting into something else. The idea is to give Tom almost full control over the look and feel of the game right from within the drawing program. This means controlling composition, camera framing, tonal contrast, lighting, shadows, textures, fog, all the things he would naturally draw if he were working on it. one of his works.
We had to find a way to get Tom to do all of this, while still retaining the ability to completely recreate everything in the game engine and make it interactive. We used classes in the drawing program to keep the logic elements separate from each other, then wrote a script to cycle through the layers and convert them into something the game engine could handle.
Bringing concept art to life in games
To give Silt class, Tom creates a single, single, high-resolution image in a drawing program. He designed it, composed it, illuminated it, detailed it as if he were producing a digital painting. Then we run a script that turns the single multi-layer art file into a fully interactive level in the game engine, cuts it into chunks, places them in the right places in the scene, creates a collision , add dynamic lighting, create entry and exit points, set up the camera, and wire up the scripts for the game.
We configure all of this using the names of the layers in the art file. After that script runs, the level is ready to play. We can then add additional game elements, visual effects, and sound to the game engine to help it come together into an atmospheric, immersive experience.
Timelapse showing the process of creating an area in Silt
We spent a long time repeating this process, to get the in-game look and feel as close to what it looks like in a drawing program as possible. When it’s done, Tom can design our game world with confidence that his artwork will appear in the game just as he intended. Investing time and effort to get the technical barriers out of the way of art can really pay off in the long run.
We hope that gives you more insight into the world of Silt. One of our main ambitions for the game is to deliver a unique, surreal experience that we hope you’ll remember long after you’ve finished playing, and we can’t wait for you to uncover the depths. when the game launches on PS5 and PS4 on June 1.
