Is every cube separate?

The environments are constructed in quite a straightforward way. We have a modular kit of cubes in varying sizes (1×1, 2×2, 3×3 etc…) that we place in-engine. For eachsize we have several variations of the mesh with the cubes extruded at slightly different heights which is what creates the scattering effect. The cubes in each mesh have all possible verts welded and faces deleted to make them as efficient as possible.

Animating cubes

Unfortunately it was beyond the scope of what the team could achieve for this project. We do however have other elements in the environment that animate (particles, foliage, clouds, moving walls etc..) that help give life to the environments.

Materials

We’re not doing anything particularly bespoke with our materials and techniques. To avoid obvious texture repetition we use world-space mapping across all of environment textures and a combination of SD and PS to generate our textures.

The biggest difficulty was definitely balancing the amount of visual noise in the environment. The entire environment is made up of small cubes that create a lot of horizontal and vertical lines. Each cube has a rough, weathered material that reflects the world around it. It all generates a considerable amount of visual noise that can be very distracting. We believe,for this game, that the art should be secondary to the puzzles, the player should be able to easily identify every puzzle element in the room from the moment they walk in. Balancing the materials to allow for this without completely removing the reflections and texture was easily the hardest part of building them.