Issue #1 - Black Prophecy's Art Direction: The game environment

Welcome to the first issue of the Black Prophecy Developer Diaries. My name is Nick Ebenhoch and I am the Art Director for Black Prophecy. I will give you a glimpse into the design of the Black Prophecy universe and its factions. In the first issue we will have a look at the game environment.

Have a good read!

The game environment

The Black Prophecy universe should showcase a realistic but concurrently unreal environment. Amongst others, this was realized by the use of strong colors that you usually don’t see in a space environment. In doing so, we also paid attention to implement this subtly. Space-specific phenomena like other galaxies are not found in the backgrounds. You are still in the Milky Way but that far away from other galaxies that you are not able to see them with the naked eye.

The actual differences in the backgrounds are created in the various sectors. In addition to this the respective and distinctive characteristics of the current system you are situated in are showing up. If you are, e.g. in the Ianos system at the planet Triamon, the starting point in Black Prophecy, you will see huge rings of ice asteroids that embrace the planet. The planet is still visible in the background even if the player is moving away from Triamon and jumps into a nearby sector.

This may be not that realistic with regards to the distances but in this way the player always recognizes his location in the game world. Furthermore the game world appears more like a coherent place. Though, with increasing distance the objects in the background become optically smaller. Various colors for the sectors within one system create an additional optical difference. Sectors with ice elements are kept bluish, while “Pan’s Junkyard”, a huge space ship cemetery, is kept in a brownish color tone to let the sector appear dirty and rusty. Our goal was to create a distinctive atmosphere for each sector, from nearly romantic right up to dark and threatening.

To emphasize the impression of different distances within one system to the player, all planets, moons and stars have been created in various sizes. Particularly impressive are the orbital views that fill three full computer screens. It was also very important to us to create living worlds. Planets are rotating, cloud movements show up, the surfaces of the oceans are reflecting the incoming light, thunderbolts streak over the continents, lava bubbles out of volcanoes, mountain massifs pass by and cities change from the day into the night cycle.

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