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Terrain, buildings and boats

Hi folks, Paul here with another update on the visuals of Sunless Sea.

Having spent the first few weeks of development shuffling grey blobs around (see this post), I'm now finally getting the chance to play with the overall look of the game, which means terrain, buildings and boats (and monsters, but we'll get to those in a later post).

The biggest challenge so far has been getting some personality into ships. An object seen from above often feels unfamiliar and hard to read - we're just not conditioned to see stuff that way. And because Sunless Sea is pure 2D, we can't shift the camera around to get a better angle on a funnel, everything has to read easily from an orthographic, top-down point of view. Add the fact that the boats are pretty small - the default model is around 130 pixels high - and it quickly becomes tricky to get something that looks like a boat, let alone a grime-streaked tramp steamer at the tail end of a hard voyage.

Buildings have similar issues, although there's less of a scale problem, and roofs are very easily recognisable (the main difficulty with roofs is making them sufficiently interesting). Terrain, which is both bigger and more familiar from above, is much easier. I'm having a whale of a time detailing all the little coastal bits.

You can see how it's going in the screenshot below. This is in-engine, textures hand-painted, lighting and effects added afterwards in Unity. As ever, feedback is very much appreciated!

(click to enlarge)

boats-and-terrain