Clawville, the city that serves as the backdrop of both the Chicken Police games as well as Zipp's Café and the only part of the Wilderness you've really experienced so far, resembles parts of the USA set in the 1940s. It has a mix of architecture and art from various periods in time and it's full of unique solutions to various issues that popped up over the years, along with a lot of completely unique elements by our own design. In fact, the idea behind Clawville as a city came from the idea of what would happen if you were to combine 1940s Chicago with Victorian London to create a brand new fictional place, filled to the brim with noir-energy.
Now, it quickly became clear that we would not be able to create this strange, wild yet familiar world simply from photographs. The only way was to create it ourselves, from scratch, and take some creative liberties with the references we did have.
This idea is where our journey to create a living, breathing, gritty and believable setting begins.
The spark of an idea
Of course, it all started with an idea. We determined the most important and interesting locations in terms of narrative, worked out long and detailed descriptions and sent them to the graphic designer. They then add their own ideas to the description we provided, which was then discussed with the writer. Based on the references, like photographs of real cities and the settings in other noir media, a detailed concept can be prepared and a 3D 'greybox' prototype can be created.
In order to get the final look, a much larger portion has to be designed and partially built. That way, all the details and perspectives are believable. It's not just the scenes you visit, but also the spaces around these locations! Luckily for us, most backdrops are static.
Meat, skin and feathers
Once this concept is ready, a team of 3D artist will build the final render. This is where the actual models and textures are put in place, which are filled with additional bits of art and lore where needed. This includes things like posters on the wall, a newspaper on the floor or adverts on the signposts.
The resulting render is already beautiful, but there isn't much to do yet. After all, what we have so far is a static place brimming with detail, but the functionality for you to interact with things does not exist yet. This is where the magic of the tech-artists and coders comes in to make the world discoverable and enjoyable. They place all the extra effects, moving parts and lights inside the game engine. The newspaper you can pick up to read about the latest gossip in Clawville is their job!
It's alive!
Once the layered renders arrive at our tech artist, they can get to work on bringing the scene to life within the game engine. This process is where most of the pitfalls are, as we're taking the 3D scene and turning them in 2D renders to work as backdrops and then rework them back into both 2D and 3D layers. You end up with a 2.5D scene where things move just enough to give the scene the visual depth of 3D, while remaining 2D.
As you'll now be able to experience the Wilderness in both noir and technicolor, we faced a couple more challenges when it comes to color and the lack thereof. Paint it RED! was made with colors to get the shades of grey just right, but the colors were manipulated in a way to make them look better in black & white. This came out the cost of the game just not looking that great in color. When it comes to Into the HIVE! however, the game should look great in both color and noir modes, so we had to make sure the base colors are visually appealing to look at and translate well into black & white.
You've seen the fruit of our labor in the two trailers we've released so far, but soon you'll be able to experience it firsthand in our upcoming public demo early next year. We're excited!
In the meantime though, please help us spread the word about Chicken Police – Into the HIVE! and how it's going to deliver something new and wild!
Be sure to wishlist the game, and if you haven't already, pick up Zipp's Café! It's a standalone little café management game that acts as a prequel story to Into the HIVE!.
The Wild Gentlemen
Wishlist Chicken Police – Into the HIVE!: Store.steampowered.com
Play Zipp's Café: Store.steampowered.com
Added to Wishlist! Looks pretty slick.
Awesome, thank you! 😁