British developer Revolution Studios has unveiled a new dev diary exploring the art style of adventure Beyond a Steel Sky.
The video features legendary Watchmen creator Dave Gibbons with fellow art director Sucha Singh detailing the game’s signature comic book aesthetic. The team looked at a variety of cel-shaded renderers they hoped to use for the game. However, they found none of them emulated Gibbons’ art from the traditional page.
In the end, the studio landed on an in-house line rendering system, that also converts details like bumps and crevices in real time. Gibbons also spent plenty of time on character designs, producing 15-20 sketches of every character. The rest of the team look at these drawings, and whittle them down to 3 or 4. Gibbons makes another pass at these three or four with a more detailed attempt. This finally gets passed onto the rest of the art team for details and a 3D model is made.
The rest of the video is a fascinating insight into the design process for the game, which will be arriving on console next month. It first arrived on Apple Arcade last year, before arriving on PC about a month or so later.
Beyond a Steel Sky arrives November 30 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch.
