Wayfinder : The Chasm
The Chasm marked my last contribution at Airship Syndicate. I was lucky to drive a huge part of it and did a lot of moods and assets explorations. Baldi Konijn (Concept Artist) Jesse Carpenter (Art Director) and I started doing exploration and what that area could look like. John Stamos (Lead Worldbuilding) also deserves a huge shoutout for bringing great ideas and compositions on our test maps!
Back then, we called that area The Gorge, the main idea was to have this environment being inside of a huge Chasm, you would go on roots, find ancient ruins and fight new enemies.
One of the first element I started working on was humidity, we wanted to convey this throught puddles, water leaking on rocks and cliffs that would be coming from the top of the Chasm and running along the walls.
We worked together with Jesse Carpenter to create a new Rocks and Cliffs set for this new biome. The idea was to have a nice modular kit where we could build interesting shapes for most of the Chasm environment.
I was also in charge of creating a brand new foliage kit, the Chasm was going to be really dark and deep, we wanted to have multiple elements that could bring light to the environment and guide the players, Luminescent plants and animals sounded like a cool way to do that.
Enbankments, Ivy, Volumetric moss, new pebbles and rocks, this was a fun way to really bring the “It’s always raining in this place!” mood that we wanted to convey… but it was missing one key elements!
Massive roots! You can walk on and use those to explore the environment on different vertical levels, this could be used as a bridge, a blocker, an elevation and was also quite a fun challenge for the world design. The main roots were tileables sculpts bent on a spline curve, easy to place in engine for the worldbuilders, those would then be painted with foliages on top of them and had the ability to be vertex painted to create a path on them.
It’s always fun to walk on roots! But being able to do it in multiplayer or even with enemies was something new for us, adapting the size and radius of those was going to be important!
I also worked with Seth Baldwin ir oder to create Ruins you could find and uncover the secret of! Those would be way older than your typical Codex Halls ruins, they had to be massive, made of fewer and bigger elements, to show that the technology level to achieve those had to be way more advance that a simple brick wall.
A small set of decals was created in order to add a bit more details to those massive structures, dirt, debris, moss… those would be placed on top as meshes using the foliage painter tool.
Sample of the decals that were used in that area.
Roots, Ruins, Moss, Cliffs and Rocks, we had out main elements to I created this small diorama before starting to worldbuild on a test map.
After an afternoon of worldbuilding, the Chasm was starting to look closer to what we wanted, it was fun to put the elements together for the first time and see how things we working together, what we needed to adjust, what was missing, what could be improved for readability and gameplay.
Time of Day could also be present and impact the map differently from the others, at rarer times the sun could align with the Chasm and hit directly and the bottom of it, bringing warmer colors in the middle of this lost world.
Playing with chromatic values could also help us guide the players, here’s a test I’ve worked on in order to bring some red color variations in that mostly green/blue environment.
Due to the environment being always rainy and humid, I had this idea of accumulating massive water pools in some areas in order to create flatter fighting grounds. Here’s a test with a enemy that is unrelated to the biome.
I also worked a bit on bringing life to the environment, from small insects to bigger nests. This I probably one of the last assets I’ve made for Airship Syndicate.
On top of the assets themselves, the worldbuilding and the shaders, I also worked on what I called the “Natural Event System” which would allow us to create trigger areas and play pre baked physic animations and VFX while players explored the area, this could be used to show how old a place is, or even attract the attention.
Integrating those massive walls and ruins into the natural environment helped us create a mysterious atmosphere, what would players discover within those? The concept art from Baldi always filled me with inspiration.
After all those years, seeing the Chasm out filles me with enjoyment, the ideas behind it were new for the game and I hope that those of you who will experience it will forge great adventuring memories!
Wayfinder is releasing in 1.0 on October 21rst with the Crucible! Give the game a chance if you haven’t already!
Writing this one made me nostalgic of my time at Airship! This was the final biome I worked on before quitting, so if any of you Airship folks are reading this, I can’t thank you enough for those four years with you forging a brand new world, you are missed!
