The following is the second of a two-part entry from Senior Environment Artist Doug Van Horne discussing the process of creating in-game environments for Dark Void.

Freedom is a Good Thing

Ah ... freedom!

Freedom from making another tunnel. Freedom from the headache of trying to make a beautiful landscape fit in the memory usually allotted for ... wait ... hang on ... what did the designer just say? He wants to mix WHAT?! He wants to seamlessly mix FLIGHT COMBAT AND COVER-BASED GROUND COMBAT?!

A funny thing happens at that point: the five stages of grief. You go through them, but in a very odd way. Instead of weeks or months traversing through the mire of doubt and despair, the entire process takes about 4 minutes:

• Denial: (Laughing nervously) "What? You're kidding. That's impossible. You can't mix a flying environment with a shooter environment. They're like ... different and stuff."
• Anger: "Oh ... you're serious! Like you're seriously serious?"
• Bargaining: "What if we remove the flying part? No?"
• Depression: (Heavy mental sigh followed by real sigh; whispers to self) "This is going to be painful."

About two minutes later, after the thrill-junkie part of your brain - the part that might have thought it would be a good idea to build a BMX ramp from discarded plywood so you can jump over your friends stupid enough to lie down between your makeshift "ramps" - wakes up and you say ...

• Acceptance: "Hang on a sec ... so flying ... like really cool, aerial maneuver agile trick flying, plus air combat ... seamlessly mixed with cover-based ground combat? If we do that right, it will be AMAZING!!!!"

And the designer says with a slightly over-confident grin, "Yep." (pause) "Oh, and I forgot to mention, in parts of the combat the entire world will fluidly rotate so the player plays it vertically instead of horizontally."

• Denial: (laughing nervously) "What? You're kidding. That's impossible ..."

But after months of trials, work that didn't work, and a few redos, we found a way to smash the rock of flying combat against the rocks of cover-based ground combat and vertical combat and when the dust settled, we had one large, kick ass rock.

Anyway, that's about it for me. Keep checking back for more updates on our Voidy goodness.

Enjoy the game!

- Doug Van Horne