Speculation Update Time!

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, March 28, 2013, 23:10 (4256 days ago) @ Ragashingo

2. Concept Art = Concept Reality.

One of the most impressive things I saw during the talk was Grognok. I'm no game developer. Maybe all games are developed like this. But by the way it was talked about, I don't think so. What impressed the most though, apart from fiddling with the time of day slider, was the apparent ease of going from the concept art to the working, lit, almost playable looking, finished product. Maybe the moon base was nothing to write home about (I think it was pretty cool, but whatevers) but now take a step back and look at all the concept art we've seen so far. If all of that can be turned into gameplay quality environments as easily as the moon base was… then WOW!! We're going to have something awesome on our hands!

I don't want to rain on the parade, because the Grognok demo is extremely cool, but it bears mentioning that one of the reasons it was constructed so fast is that Grognok focuses on enabling fast construction and iteration with very modular designs.

The base was able to be made quickly because it was made from a surprisingly small number of pieces that already existed. They were painstakingly constructed prior to the base's assembly in Grognok. If something totally unique needs to be placed somewhere, and artist is going to have to go make it in a modeling tool.
Basically, you can't just present arbitrary art and have it turned into high-quality environment in half an hour. Someone is still going to have to build any new assets.

Not that I think this is a terrible thing. I love Halo 1's environments, and they use tons and tons of modularity as well.