“Hi guys! I'm Victor, or Mr4Goosey (after my last name, Goossens)! I’m happy to say I’m Lo-Fi’s new Technical Artist (I’ll call it TA for short, so that doesn’t stand for Teaching Assistant here). Most of you are probably not really sure what that means, though. In a nutshell, my job as a Technical Artist is to be a bridge between the art department and the programming department. I do artsy things that are too technical for the artists, and I do technical things that are too artsy for the programmers.
I’ve been doing indie-development on all kinds of projects for years now. I got into game development as a programmer, but quickly developed a passion for creating beautiful things – bringing me to the specialized niche that is Technical Art.
Most of the work I do relates somehow to what your graphics card is doing while you’re playing games; I handle lighting, all kinds of color-balancing, and most importantly, I deal with shaders, the ‘code’ that tells your graphics card what every pixel on your screen should look like. Having specialized in Unreal Engine 4, a lot of the shader-work I do is actually material-based (using UE4’s node system). That doesn’t necessarily make the job much simpler (you still need to understand how rendering engines and graphics cards work), but definitely a bit easier to understand at a basic level. I also work with artists to work out any kinks in their work flow, as well as dealing with performance-budgets and optimization.
You might now be wondering what that means for Kenshi in the larger scheme of things. As you guys probably know we’ve decided to move to Unreal Engine 4 for Kenshi 2. Having years of experience in UE4, I’ll be working to smooth out the transition from Ogre, helping the team get used to Unreal’s way of working. Unreal Engine 4 has an incredibly powerful and versatile rendering engine – if you know how to work with it, because that power comes at the cost of complexity. The plan is for Kenshi 2 to be graphically above and beyond anything we could ever do in Ogre, and I’m here to make sure that we can actually pull that off. An easy example for that is what I’m actually working on right now:
Kenshi 2’s new Time-of-Day system, and primarily, its clouds! Kenshi’s fully dynamic lighting and environment is a massive challenge to represent properly, and it means things like clouds just cannot be left static. Kenshi’s new clouds grow, move and morph over time – all without melting your graphics card! Next up is just about every other material in Kenshi...”
“Hey, I'm Boodals, the newest programmer at LoFi. Ever since I was first hired in November, I've been working on remaking the GUIs from Kenshi 1 in Unreal Engine for Kenshi 2. Its too early in development to know everything that the GUIs need to be able to do, so we're just copying the designs (graphics & layout) from K1, and focusing entirely on getting the functionality working so we can test things. That means they currently look like uglier versions of the K1 GUIs, so there's no point in showing any pictures yet, somebody will make them look pretty at some point in the future.Harrison first took up coding to make mods for various games before pursuing it as a career choice, which gives us another great point of insight as we make a conscious effort to support the community’s efforts again in Kenshi 2.
The GUIs in Kenshi 1 were made using a programming library called MyGUI, which allows modders to reskin GUIs, and move individual GUI elements (buttons, text, sliders, etc) around by changing specific files. However, the GUI's functionality was hard-coded in the game's source code, which cannot be changed by modders. This means you cannot make a mod which adds a new button, only change what every button looks like, or move existing buttons around.
For Kenshi 2, we are using Unreal Engine which comes with it's own GUI system called Unreal Motion Graphics, or UMG for short. UMG is tied closely to Unreal's Blueprint scripting system, which is used to give the GUIs functionality.
We don't entirely know how modding will work for K2, but when we looked at other Unreal games that allow modding (such as ARK: Survival Evolved), both UMG and Blueprint is completely available. So in theory, modders will be able to change the game's GUIs, and script them to be able to do just about anything. This is in addition to the Forgotten Construction Set, so mods that add or change weapons, armour, items, buildings, and most other things in K1 will still be possible.”
“I’m currently working on the foundations of Kenshi’s story and content, which means a lot of switching between open world design and writing world lore (... I may or may not have ended up with my own endless encyclopedia of Kenshi lore at this point). First up I’ve had to map out the ruins which need preserving from kenshi 1, comparing three different timelines to make sure the layout and history are consistent.For some additional musings on the inner workings of Kenshi such as NPC dialogue and world building, check out Natalie’s blog entries on Gamasutra.
This takes a huge amount of time, essentially working on two different world timelines as I go back and delve more into Kenshi’s ancient history. It all helps in keeping the explorable ruins nice and interesting, plus it helps to work out the evolution of its current factions, making for some really original cultures. So my working map right now has a bunch of overlays from the different timelines, plus the current faction’s territories, their safe(ish) zones, danger zones, wtf?!? zones, wildlife and enemy territories.
I’m constantly working back and forth between fleshing out the main faction lore, making a list of squads in that territory, mapping out the town locations, working out the individual town conflicts and stories, plus figuring out all of their gameplay roles, goals, motives, and traits. After a rough placement around the world, I’ve begun concentrating on a 1/6th of the map portion (one of the safer zones) and fleshed it out with any split off groups that may have conflicted with its main faction, any dens, bases and other more interesting POIs. Spider diagrams have become my best friend at this point :’)
It’s been a slow process. The map is… considerably bigger than Kenshi 1’s; it’s a challenge to fill it with interesting content as well as balance it for a desolate, wild atmosphere. I’m conscious of not filling the world with shallow or empty content, instead focusing more on the individual towns and their micro-cultures. Admittedly I have to keep reigning myself in from overcomplicating the whole thing - this is a sandbox game with subtle, environmental story-telling, not a heavily story-driven RPG.
It feels like I’ve had to scrap a lot of ideas so far but I’m starting to pick up some momentum as everything finally clicks nicely into place. World building and writing is a lot like sculpting a statue or painting, you have to constantly add, tweak, delete, repeat… it takes some patience but it’s all part of the process!”
