Greetings Citizens,

We’re leaving you this week with the first piece of finished environmental concept art for Star Citizen. This is Spider, in the Cathcart System, which you may remember as one of the unlocks from the pledge campaign.

When creating a location in Star Citizen, we first do a text description similar to those you’ve seen before: what’s in the system, what makes it unique, where would you want to land. We then turn it over to an artist who creates an initial “Look and Feel” environmental concept. We will then go back and forth until the team is happy with the piece—this could be two, five or twenty revisions! The Look and Feel concept is used to capture the overall mood and atmosphere we are looking to capture with each planet, but might not be completely representative of the finished, in-game level. After creating the Look and Feel piece, we will get additional artwork to further detail the architecture, props, details, and interiors of any shops and locations on the planet. After the concepts are finalized and approved, we use them to begin building the environment art assets in 3D, while the Design team uses the information in the concepts to begin working on level layout and design in the CryEngine.

Spider is the first location we consider good enough to base the final game on… but many more are in the pipeline now! We’ll be sharing them with the community as they are approved, so you have plenty to look forward to in the coming weeks! Please be patient: Rome wasn’t build in a day… and neither was Terra!