Obduction is a curious project from an Art Direction standpoint, because although it is in no way connected to Myst series, it is very much intended to follow in the footsteps of those games – especially as far as the player’s experience of exploration and discovery goes. As such, we didn’t want to stray too far from the overall visual style of Myst and Riven, which I guess I would describe and “surreal photo-realism”. It means I didn’t want to push the stylization too far from photo-reference (say, like The Witness did with it’s heavy simplification and visual deconstruction)… and we are instead relying heavily on photo-sourced texturing and not shying as much away from surface detail. Of course we need our sweeping vistas and dramatic reveals, but I think the single biggest recurring theme in Obduction is visual juxtaposition or otherwise disparate elements. The main world of the game is heavily designed around this concept, with elements from various different origins (and even time periods) being blended together in the same space. This theme is further reinforced by the central narrative, which is all about parts of multiple worlds being thrown together in the same physical space, and how those different elements contrast each other in interesting ways… Again, not too unlike the original Myst aesthetic.

Environment Creation

All of the world designs for Obduction actually began life as top-down maps handed to us from the Design team (led by company founder Rand Miller). Once we began mocking them up in 3D, we did so directly inside Unreal 4, using a toolset we added called “Slabs”. This very simple prototyping method is actually something I became absolutely addicted to when using Jonathan Blow’s custom engine for The Witness, and it was one of the first things our programmers implemented in Unreal. It’s essentially just a way to re-size 6-sided cubes by dragging them one face at a time… rapidly authoring complex forms out of basic volumes, all directly inside the Unreal Editor. As the game worlds got more and more refined, we started replacing the slabs with actual geometry assets, but it allowed us to flesh out the entire scope of the game immeasurably faster than if we’d tried to mock it up with custom meshes.