Let’s start by having you tell the FCT community a bit about yourself!
Hi there! My name is Andreas. I’ve been with Invisible Walls almost since the beginning. I left my work in the medical industry to pursue my passion for visual development and started as an intern Concept Artist at the company.
Since then, I’ve transferred into the role of Art Director, where my responsibilities expanded to everything related to the visual side of FCT (or Cainwood, as it was called back then).
What is a typical day like for you at Invisible Walls?
I very rarely have two days that are alike. However, most days involve a lot of talking, discussing feedback and planning with all our talented artists to make sure we are on track, and ensuring that everyone knows what to prioritize.
In between all the meetings, my time is often spent either designing assets and “kits” for in game use or assisting on marketing materials, UI work, and various design challenges. I love every single second of it.
How does your work begin on a new project? For example, once the team decides on a new area, like the Botanical Gardens, what comes next for you?
When we start work on a new area, the first step is always to collect as much inspiration as possible. We typically fill out a large reference sheet with a wide range of visual material that we find interesting to the area we are developing. It can be anything from images from the 50s to contemporary patterns, color combinations and architectural solutions that we feel could work on board the Alithea.
From there, Sebastian and I try to agree on an overall direction and rough level layout so that he can begin level design, and I can begin designing the visual style of all the items that will go into the area.
Back when I started, we often rendered 2D pieces of the new areas. However, I found this to be fairly time consuming considering our limited resources. For this reason, we have transferred to a more 3D integrated workflow, where me and the other artists typically mock up a lot of the design in rough 3D for the level designers to use right away. These are then replaced as the 3D artists update them with final 3D models. This way, the level designers can work almost in parallel with the art team.
Since there aren’t a lot of gardens in space (that we know of,) what’s your research process like, and where do you look for inspiration?
As with most things related to FCT, we try to keep everything a bit grounded and widely influenced by designs from around the mid century era. We also looked into how other games have done “biodomes” and similar areas. Prey is a good example of this (I absolutely love the visual design of that game, and we often visit it during development).
We quickly realized that some obvious and fitting sources of inspiration were located in our own backyard in the form of The Botanical Garden in Copenhagen and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, an art and archeological museum. Mix it up with a skybox of space, and the Alithea Gardens almost created itself.
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