Our quick elevator pitch is “Oregon Trail meets FTL with AAA graphics”. It truly is essentially that. It’s a space survival game where after countless attacks from an alien race (the Skorn), you have to get the last members of your civilization across the galaxy to the only habitable planet for your kind. You get to pick the loadout of your ship, the starting resources you want to take and also pick what crew officers you want. The beginning of our game is vital. Those choices will drastically change how the game is played and how successful your journey will be. After that, you set off into the unknown towards Titus Nova in a sandbox world where you get to interact with planets, fight or trade with aliens, and investigate everything for resources to continue your journey and keep everyone alive.

The Creation of the Visuals

Into The Stars Characters by IronKlad Studios.

We outsourced the character models to Eric Valdes. The crew, aliens, and landscape portraits were done by IronKlad Studios. Lastly the awesome mood concept pieces in our Kickstarter were done by Stu Kim…all amazing artist and also close friends.

Into The Stars

My motivation for the art style was to find a unique visual style within space games…a lot harder than I imagined. After watching Guardians of the Galaxy (read our interview with the concept artist, who worked on this movie), I was enamored with how bold and colorful they depicted all the space shots. I love brave, unapologetic art styles when they are executed properly. I mean, yeah that’s not what space looks like at all, but here is this gorgeous visual composition based off the coolest satellite images available…sign me up! That movie really made me go towards a vibrant art direction.

Into The Stars

As far as visual goals go, honestly I just wanted to compete with the big guys, visually. Space is a popular setting right now and with good reason (cause it’s awesome). The market has some really gorgeous space games available and I knew the other guys on my team where making this really unique and new blend of gameplay, I didn’t want our visuals to be responsible for skirting our game under a rug while standing next to those titles. Granted those other teams are much larger. I just had to at least give it shot and try to be competitive in that regard.

Using Unreal Engine 4

Into The Stars in Unreal Engine 4.

UE4 is amazing! I’m an old school modder, so I have personally been messing with the Unreal Editor since about 2004. I know Roy has been using Unreal for many years on several games and Marc has done some pretty insane stuff in our game using blueprint. One aspect that Marc implemented while R&D’ing streaming methods was called “world browser,” which was in its beta phase at the time. He and Roy took hand into constructing our world using that streaming system. Now we have this huge star system that you can literally go anywhere you want without load screens. That was a big win and pretty much the back bone to our game.

Unreal Engine has come a long ways through the years, but they have had the same unspoken motto since day one… “For Devs, By Devs”. Any good dev that’s never used UE4 before, can pick it up on a Friday and they will have a high quality prototype game, playable by Monday. Honestly something like that was almost impossible until UE4 was released.

Working out Into The Stars

I actually did a lot of planning before I touched any software. A key aspect to all the content in the game is using parent and instance shaders. I also leveraged high res noise and tileables to make sure the texel density of everything remained sharp. The planets are built off a parent shader that has several mask to determine three different masses or shapes within the planet and within those mask. I have several tileables setup to make them look like terrain or clouds and things of that nature. Each one of those have some vector parameters that let the designer specify what colors the planet will use. The same techniques were used for all the particles and even the ship materials too.

Into The Stars in Unreal Engine 4. Lighting.

The deferred rendering in Unreal lets me leverage my personal art style. I’m an old school oil painter, so I literally paint with lights. Since our entire game uses dynamic lighting, I’m able to just let the Directional light handle the main lighting and shadows, while I place hundreds of point lights with no shadows to do all the shading work at minimal cost to the frame. I’m also using an HDRI map for image based lighting to make sure there is another level of surface variance specially for both diffused and specular reflections.

The Best Tools Make The Best Game

I don’t put any object in game without running it through a tool from the Quixel suite…It’s my utility belt. I save so much time using it…literally making things that should take me days to do and letting it be accessible within a couple hours. I use 3ds Max for all my 3d work and let’s not forget the unsung hero for so many games, Xnormal.

When we started developing the game, UMG was not available but we had to start making a game. We implemented the Radiant SDK which is a third party plugin for UE4 that lets us use Adobe Edge Animate to make all the UI.