Hello everyone!
As promised in last week’s Friday Dev News, we’re now showing our first 3D concepts for the new biomes. For now these are just artist test scenes and not procedurally generated. That comes later!
We tried to make the landscape look both interesting and alien, but still familiar enough that it doesn’t look “off”. Also, we added some slight fog effects for visual variety, but not so dense that they get in the way of gameplay or make the scene too dark.
Dried River
While the dried river contains no flowing water, it’s geology makes it a lot easier to reach underground water and methane deposits. The steep rock walls protect the area from both sun and wind and gives opportunity for mushroom-like alien plants to grow on the sides.
Petrified Crater
The petrified crater is a very different biome: It seems like a large asteroid impact long ago has compressed the soil can’t hold much liquid resources at all and neither man nor nature can reach through the ground very easily. Any plants that grow here risk drying out and getting petrified in seasons with a lot of sun. On the other hand, the leftover asteroid material provides for some rich aluminum deposits.
I hope you like the scenes so far, let us know what you think! The art team would be happy to hear any comments.
We’ll be able to show some of the other new biomes next week.
In other news, after 2 years of pandemic, I finally got covid myself. Luckily I’m already well on the road to recovery and the rest of the (remote) team has been doing a great job of continuing work on the game in the meantime, so it all turned out fine 
See you next week and happy playing!
