Light Everyone!
Welcome to a new development blog entry for Aquanox Deep Descent. This one is very special for us, as we are creating this entry live from our new studio environment in Novi Sad! The place is great, the food is awesome and we have one of the best views EVER! Check it out:
While some of our staff will be working remotely, we are bringing most of the team together at the new office. The more, the merrier! We’ve already spent some great time together, and have been working away at creating a new Aqua. Currently, about half our core team is at the office, with the rest soon to come. We have new people arriving every week, and it’s very exciting to meet everyone in person, as a lot of the team has already worked together previously, but remotely from their respective homes. Some areas, like some of the 3D work, some of the concept art, some of the audio and music – will remain remote for the whole project.
So what are the plans for the next few weeks?
A lot is going on right now. One of the main challenges at the start of a production is making a lot of ground decisions to build the game upon. Things like the artistic mood of the game, scale of maps, technicalities like the modularity of our ships or how the terrain will be created. Putting all of it into one blog entry would be bonkers – so we’ll update you as often as we can! :)
In this blogpost, we’ll focus more on our experiments with mood and environment design. This is one of our favorite subjects. We’ve read so many suggestions and ideas from the fans of the old games, and we’ve revisited the old Aquanox games (including Archimedean Dynasty) to try and find a great mix of what made those games special, while still giving Aquanox Deep Descent it’s very own personality.
Dejan, one of our lead concept artists responsible for environment concept art and design has already done a few images, to capture the mood that the final game should convey. Obviously, nothing of this is set in stone yet, it will grow and develop over the coming months. We all agree that we want to take the game towards a dark mood, something where the players will really feel like they are in the deep sea. Have a look at one of the initial artworks:
Dejan also drafted a top-down cross section of the environment for better understanding what is going on in there. This is a great example of how we plan to approach levels that can be explored from above, but also lower, between all those cracks and rocks. Exploration is a very important part of the gameplay but also of the general experience that Aquanox will provide.
We are always eager to hear your thoughts, suggestions, ideas and more. Stay tuned for more updates, covering various areas of the development of the game.
Thanks again from the entire Aquanox Team!
If you would like to follow the progress of the development of Aquanox Deep Descent, make sure to follow us here and on our other social channels.
Aquanox Facebook Page
Aquanox Forums
Digital Arrow Youtube
Nordic Games Twitter
Digital Arrow Twitter