We’ve had the great pride and pleasure of having Bulletstorm art be on the front page on several of the world’s biggest magazines. It always feels amazing, but in a way it’s a shame to cover up such pretty pictures with text, so I thought I’d share with you some of the art pieces, in their original form and let one of our artists explain the process.
Remember that Bulletstorm “Bulletpoints” promo video with Cliff Bleszinski, where he goes “Grandpa always told me that I can do anything if I set my mind to it, so I made a game where you can blow up a man’s asshole”?
Yeah. That’s not ALL you can do that man’s bodypart.
When designing a level, we need to consider what the overall experience for the player should be and it usually boils down to a single question: “Is it fun?” And for the sake of making any given area as entertaining as possible, we focus most of our attention on gameplay. There is, however, a part of Level Design that, if neglected and not kept consistent all the way through development, will make the end result look like a random assembly of interconnected rooms devoid of any personality. I am talking about storytelling.
Hi I’m Krzysztof Dolas (‘Hatred’), an Environment Artist here at People Can Fly. I work with Level Artists from the Art Pit on all the things you see around our characters. This can be any object from a rock to a bridge.
If you’ve read some of the previous blog posts, you might be asking yourself how much effort does it take to make a single level? Let me give you an example from Bulletstorm’s pipeline; creating a simple “Office Chair”. Sounds easy right? Well read on….
How many games have you played when every enemy looks the bloody same? Remember the old side scrolling beat-em-ups? It was like killing angry Bob and his entire gigantic family of dumb identical twin brothers and all their identical friends who also shopped at the same clothing store.
But there’s a reason for that, and it’s called memory space. It haunted us then and it still haunts us now. So how did we go about solving this problem in Bulletstorm? We created an entire army using one bald dude.
That is quite insulting, isn’t it? I hope I didn’t insult anyone too much, because it is all part of an elaborate plan. Piqued your interest? Well then, click ‘Continue reading’.
Imagine that you are standing knee deep in water in a flooded corridor. Three giant douchebags dual-wielding flailguns, riding rocket propelled rhinos on roller-skates are charging down on you. You grip the weapon in your sweaty hand as you think “What shall I do?”
Final phase of the project means working until you fall asleep head down on your desk, then having someone from production come and give you a shot of caffeine to keep you going a bit longer. It is a crazy, chaotic and fun experience that leaves room for little else. Still, there’s always time to write about bacon in Bulletstorm.
