Environments and Scenery Upgrade

Our latest work on mission environments

This is a shot of SiteLab, the tool we use to iterate on procedurally generated mission maps. Previously our sites had some big limitations. Towers were always in the forest, and always had roughly the same scenery (furniture), no matter what tile they were on or monster was present.

We've taken the time to break all that apart, and generalize it, in order to give us much greater site variety, and in order to make sites much easier to work on/add in the future.

We've also added a ton of new furniture! biome specific furniture, monster specific furniture, and Station specific furniture, which varies depending on the kind of site you're at. Lamps. Set Pieces. Focal Points. Tons of good stuff coming in right now. Here are some quick work-in-progress shots.

Morthagi defending a Lumberyard they've infested in the forest.

Gorgons defending a Library (inside a tower) in the swamp at night. 

Drauven defending a Primal Altar in the hills

Thrixl invading a forest town at night.

As part of this, we made some big improvements to lamps, which are now interactive and have interesting interfuse abilities, and we removed the "beacon doors" we had before in the Cottage map, because they were confusing.

I'm really excited to see all the new environment variety coming together, and with all this new scenery we want to focus on adding appropriate interactions and interfusion recipes for it, so different sites should play differently, depending on what kind of scenery is available. Exciting times!