ZERO KING
Hal SMITH STEVENS
ART DIRECTION – WORLD BUILDING – MATTE PAINTING
Early on, the team at Zero King came to us to look into the overall world of the game and how we could create a cohesive and unique Universe. Establishing the key visual pillars that would best support the story of the game experience for the player was our first goal as we jumped into space.
The world of Zero King is deeply inspired by Japanese culture and heavily influenced by the cyberpunk movement. This gave us some freedom in how extreme we could go for the backstory of the universe surrounding the main game play area. Planets being harvested, Black hole sucking entire galaxies, or asteroid belt and exploring stars. Anything felt possible within the world of Zero King.
Space is so vast that to narrow down our approach to the environment design stage, we decided to focus on some small environments scenes that would fill in the sky around the arena. This gave us areas of focus from a design perspective and also let us explore different ideas. This also informed the world building of the game for the dev team.
We used the environment to add depth to the world of Zero King. Since the player is confined to the arena space, we aimed to spark their curiosity about the larger world beyond.
Base on our thumbnails sketches, we refined further small scenes and selected key areas of the skybox to enrich the player’s experience and expand the game’s universe. Our main areas of focus was on the isolated and overall composition. We also used key areas for the main source of light which were multiple; to create highly contrasted zones of interest for the player. Influencing the gameplay feel and dramaturgy.
We worked along side the dev team to optimize the 2D elements and implement them in the game. We had to work around resolution constrains to find the best balance between performances and visual quality. We set up a workflow in Nuke to streamline the conformation of the layers elements we were providing the dev team in order to have faster turn around on our updates.
We also focused on one of the game’s most iconic features: The Junker Station. These stations play a crucial role in the backstory of the Junkers, the game’s main characters.
They’re space cities with their own self-sustaining ecosystems and intricate structure. The design had to feel complex, yet every element had to serve a clear purpose. While the stations needed to be efficient, they also had to flow in a way that reflected the unique craftsmanship of their inhabitants. At a glance, players should immediately grasp the key elements of the station, fully understanding its design as a cohesive whole.
Later in the development we were lucky to jump on a different aspect of the game : the Arena. This is the main space the player can navigate and see as they build their own ship. Our main goal was to explore its design; defining its size and shape in relation to the gameplay. Both from inside the arena and while looking at it from a different area in space. Our secondary tasks was to help the VFX team to build the electric field around the game arena.
We started by focusing on its overall shape and the purpose of its distinct pieces. The early on decided that the arena had to have a top and bottom to help orientate the players. We also choose to depart from the fully spherical shape to help emphasize this idea of top and bottom; the wider area being at the center of the vertical line for the player.
Once the main shape was blocked in, we proposed ideas for the energy field :
Finally, we polished a few images to finalize the visual development of the Arena environment from the 2 main perspective ; inside the game play and from the Junker station. We also mock up some UI design for the ship builder are for their UI dev team.
