-- Incoming Transmission --
Hello, Cosmonauts!
This is Skytzi, lead (and lone) artist and animator for TTT

We are happy to report that progress on episode two is going steady, with the team recently wrapping up the 7th scene - which roughly puts us somewhere around 40% of the total scenes in the first episode

To celebrate this arbitrary milestone we wanted to share with you the process of making one of these setpieces a real place you can point and click around in

Everything starts with concept art, where the team gets together to brainstorm and lay down an initial idea of what a place is going to look like

The focus at this stage is laying down the concept for the area, ideas are being thrown together on what puzzles are going to be like and key elements are dropped in, but we don't sweat it just yet
Because the sketch often predates final puzzle design it will lack some key elements, but it's nonetheless a place with its own identity and purpose - both in world and ingame

A second sketch pass then follows, this is more detailed and you can see already see some decisions were taken to accommodate the game engine: the solar panel legs have been simplified and the spacing between panels is increased to allow the character to move around more easil and some more objects have been added for both flavor and puzzle solving, more panels have been added in the foreground to make you feel like there's much more just outside of view



A few revisions later we have the final scene, more details have been added, some are just meant to make the environment look more consistent (a second power cabinet has been added on the leftmost panel), others have a purpose (the entrance label was added after a playtester mentioned it wasn't clear how to leave the area

Grime has been added to the environment as well (the Space Janitor was fired, no doubt for starting an international incident)

This is also the stage where bespoke animations for a specific area are made, this is what all the frames looks at the same time (very funny)

Finally we add the silhouette of structures and/or clutter in the foreground on both sides of the scene to frame it more organically

The inspiration for this comes from how LucasArts artists used to contour their scenes to make the environment less like a movie set and more like an actual place that you're looking into

Once this is done it's time to set up the scene in Unity



Testing is then done to ensure the NavMesh (a special object that tells the engine what is a walkable surface) and the SortingMap (another special object that controls the illusion of depth by resizing objects based on how far away they are from the viewer)
Testing involves just booting the scene and walking around, refining the walkable surface if needed and making sure the characters walk around items properly

Once this is done it's time to add the hotspots to the scene, allowing the player to interact with the environment, we usually do this now because dialogue and jokes feels like a reward for going through the process of making the environment functional!



Cutscenes, puzzles and conversations then follow, but for the sake of avoiding spoilers I won't go into this part!
Finally, every scene is thoroughly tested, including saving and loading to make sure it correctly reverts to the correct state and nothing breaks

Fun Fact: did you know Adventure Games are responsible for the word "cutscene"?
The term was first used by Ron Gilbert in 1987 to describe non-interaction sections of the game Maniac Mansion.

This is all a learning experience for us, and we have been refining our process since as we learn more but for the most part this is still very much our "recipe"

I hope you have enjoyed our little behind the scenes look at what it takes to make a location come to life in Tales From Terminal Theta, if this peaks your interest at all I highly recommend you check out Adventure Creator, the Unity Asset that powers our project

-- End of Transmission --