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arriving on keres



Welcome to Keres, an unlisted planetoid on the outskirts of the system. A thin atmosphere and recently renewed geological activity make it an inhospitable environment. So what would prompt someone to build a facility out here? That’s up to you to discover...

I knew I wanted the local planet to be a dangerous place, but It had to have more going on than being a just a rock. Hours of research later, and I have some more to work with. Lunar deserts, Acidic geysers, and sharp craters dot the surface as far as the eye can see.
This is an early and by no means final test for a layout of the base on Keres. The plan was for players to start on the outskirts of the facility, and hop laterally to different areas as they move inwards, over the ridge, and eventually deeper underneath the facility. 

Arrangement of the areas required the use of different diagrams to find efficient layouts for differently purposed areas. While I expect this to change quite a bit, the general idea and facilites offer a lot potential for different spaces and encounters.


Initially, I started with the moon, but moved the location to somewhere more exotic so that it could better complement the setting. Here, lunar deserts and dunes give way to geysers spitting and rocky outcroppings. It’s devoid of any real life, but the storms and addition of an atmosphere allow for more interesting scenarios and the story and encounters.

One of the ideas I had was for these lunar sandstorms to occur outside the radius of the crater, adding an additional layer of danger to exterior traversal a player might encounter. 


One of the reasons for the base’s location at the crater reveals iself: proximity to useful metals and the nearby ice caps meets a network of mines.
Now defunct lava tunnels live in stark contrast to the rigid hallways and constructed network of catacombs reaching beneath the base. Eventually, caves and lattice work give way to more pedestrian facilities which begin to unveil some of the facilities’ purposes.
 Now, far from the stretches of rock and sand, you step through the interiors the facility that were once home to nearly 300 hundred staff. Unfortunately, few lived to tell the tale and you’ll have to navigate this spread of mechanical ducts, halls, and tunnels yourself. 

The areas needed to represent the cultural shift humanity has undergone-rejection of more complicated and elegant systems in favor of palatable and utilitarian appearances. Large affordances and a sturdy construction would need to be the focus. Something you could trust that is straightforward in it’s appearance. 

I leveraged those same shallow angles and simple shapes complemented by an array of patterns and different materials, which when embedded in the forms, elevated their complexity without betraying the look of honest simplicity I was going for. 
One of the biggest timesinks on the project but a real pleasure to work on was Unibon- my own language I created. I wanted to capture the feeling of being in a truly foreign time and place- a culture unfamiliar. In order to achieve this I leveraged some of the back story. In this world, two of the most prominent surviving cultures were of Russian and Japanese descent. So in creating a new universal language, I referenced the roots of each in matching sounds to my new language. So you’ll notice references to motifs present in Katakana, Hiragana and Cyrillic alphabets. As for it’s structure, I primarily based it on Lojban-the logical construction of which seemed like a good fit. 

The use of Unibon also enables this sort of sub-story that can be seen throughout the setting as there’s this official, universal language, but it’s not always being used. Maybe in colloquial dialogue, some people rely on their root tongue. And it can tell different things about a faction’s attitude and relationship with the central government and other groups based on how they do or don’t use this language. It may be official, but that doesn’t mean it’s always ubiquitous.

Some of the knock on affects of addressing the languages resulted in changes to existing languages as well. For instance, at this point in time, much of the Japanese in this world has been abbreviated or shortened, with the long usage of Kanji all but lost to time-primarily relegated to logos and decorative work. The sort of melding of this and other languages is part of what helps push the subtext and unique nature of the setting. It’s a story about people from different groups pushing the bounds of their own philosophies-for better or worse.

Public sector commissaries are one of the amenities provided to the inhabitants, although their supply and stocking aren’t always timely.
 I really tried to push a mix of neutral tones that would make the environments feel more human and less sterile. Sure there’s shiny plastic walls and large panels, but the contrast between solid earth tones and cool complements should help it feel like a more liveable, human environment rather than a  stark black and white laboratory. I also created a number of patterns for reuse across different environments. These can be an accent on carpet, the ceiling, or even a wall panel. 

It’s all in service of trying to build a layered visual narrative that tells you more about where humanity is at: Regaining touch with some of it’s cultural roots, but moving forward into an uncertain future. 

While I heavily utilized more earth-like tones to make areas feel more livable, splashes of aggressive color-usually in service of a specific faction or group are employed as well. Often these grouping show up in important indicators, like door headers that lead into new spaces.

I created a little over a hundred different textures for use throughout the project. While many haven’t been used extensively yet, the idea was to handmake some textures that would in themselves be curated towards the art direction rather than be reliant on 3rd party assets that would unintentionally steer the art direction of the project from the bottom up. Workflows like substance are great, but for me, I like to use an old-fashioned approach sometimes and opted to put many of these together by hand from photos and painting. 

And here are some of the earliest explorations for the interior architecture. Note the shared one point perspective in these which allowed for quick iteration and a focus on the forms and texture. This allowed me to quickly put out a variety of these when searching early on for promising routes that could be extrapolated into a variety of elements. Ultimately, where the architecture is now has differed a good bit, but there are elements here which will pop up later again, be remixed, and so on.


During the process I try to leverage as many different processes as I can. It’s easy to get hung up on one tool or approach and as a result, let it dictate the results of your work. That’s why I try to bounce back and forth between different tools and workflows. Pictured here are an example of the many sketches I made for environmental forms and props alongside one of the first batches of kits I created for kitbashing my own environments.