InnoGames' Art Team Lead Dario Berruti has told us about the developing process behind the studio's game Lost Survivors, discussed working at InnoGames, and described a perfect team member.
Introduction
My name is Dario, I’m originally from Italy and I currently work on the Lost Survivors game as Art Team Lead at InnoGames. I’m a 3D enthusiast since 1995 when I was 15 and got to know Lightwave 3D at a conference. I remember being amazed by seeing what was possible to do with that software (nowadays it would just look silly).
At that time, I'd just started attending an Art Institute as my chosen high school, studying traditional art. This gave me a good foundation for drawing, sculpting, and painting. Back then, as I was living in a small town, it was quite difficult to find a job in the CG industry and to properly learn the software, so it took me a while to hone my skills and get to a professional level.
In 2006 I got my first job in the industry and worked on a feature film Winx and the Secret of the Lost Kingdom. This was my first experience in a production environment and gave me the opportunity to learn a lot from people who were previously working for big studios around the world. After that I moved to Playstos, a company in Milan, that was working on a prototype for an Xbox 360 game. Unfortunately, the game was canceled (something that I learned to be quite common in the industry), and I had to find a new job. I then landed at Xplored, a very small company that was doing primarily advergames.
I stayed there for 5 years, it was a great experience as it gave me the opportunity to work on quite a lot of games and be responsible for the whole range of graphic work such as UI, characters, environments, and so on. It was a good lesson that let me broaden my skill set and gave me a good overview of the production process, something that would become helpful afterward.
At that point, I decided that I wanted something more and moved to InnoGames in Hamburg, Germany. It was a great decision! I had the chance to work on Elvenar as a 3D Artist, then moved to a new project, first as an Environment Artist, and later made the transition to Art Lead. That project did not make it past the soft launch, but the core team created Lost Survivors, and here we are.
The InnoGames Team
I’d like first to say a few words about Lost Survivors. We are a relatively small team. This helps to keep the process very lean and prevents unnecessary overhead.
Every game team is independent, with a leadership team (Product Owner, Technical Product Lead, Art Lead and Design Lead) that takes care of all the project's management-related tasks. When teams grow bigger, they occasionally establish front-end and back-end Leads to help manage the daily activities. We work on a bi-weekly iteration cycle, starting with sprint planning and ending with sprint review and retrospective. This allows us to break down big features into smaller chunks, easily spot bottlenecks and avoid big delays.
If I would have to point out our main strengths, those would be the very strong feedback culture, open information sharing, and data-driven approach. One example could be about creating a new app icon: we go through several iterations to make sure we pick the right one.
Fostering an environment where information is flowing across the company, sharing the achievements as well as the learnings, and offering transparency is the key to maintaining a positive atmosphere and increased ownership.
The number-driven approach allows us to make informed decisions and not let our personal feelings block us from making some tough calls. If a game is tested on the market and does not perform well, there is no point in keeping it going. There are clear indicators that help us understand if a game will work or not and it is best to use them.
Lost Survivors
The first step we usually take when designing a new game is exploring what is out there, on the market, and trying to predict what would work in 3+ years. This is partially done by analyzing our own games, seeing what the player’s behavior is, then analyzing our competitors and ultimately starting to design some potential candidates. During this time frame that we call the Pitch Phase, art is not yet very involved, since the attention is more on game design and product.
In our case, we decided to match city building mechanics, which is something that InnoGames has a lot of experience with, and add to that a strong resource management aspect. We wanted to achieve a survival setting, but only when it comes to visuals and storytelling. The game itself does not have any strict survival mechanics, like starvation or deadly animals.
After that initial phase, we move to the Conception Phase, when finally, artists begin their work and start creating the first propositions for a potential art style. This needs to be done after knowing what kind of game is going to be created and what setting will be used. Then some A/B tests were run, with mock-ups and banners, to see where we can better connect with our audience and get a clear preference. This may sound like something that is against creativity, but we do not limit ourselves beforehand, we just need to validate our direction to make sure that the game will be easy to market later.
When the art style was defined, at least on a high level, we moved to the Pre-Production Phase, where everything is fleshed out in greater detail, both from a technical and a visual perspective. We took the time to create tools, refine some early concepts, and establish a solid pipeline.
Then the Production Phase is self-explanatory, but where things are getting interesting is when we finally have the chance to perform a Retention Test: we released the game only in a few selected markets and measured how many players were still logging into our app 3 days after the install. This normally happens after 12 to 18 months of production and it’s a first chance to see actual players’ behavior, a great way to validate our ideas and spot technical issues.
This was followed by another leg of production, depending on the test’s results when we had to scale up content and features to make the game playable for roughly 90 days. At that point, we went in Soft Launch, with limited marketing campaigns and only a few active countries.
In Soft Launch, we try to prove that we can achieve a profitable business case with our game. If that target is missed and we do not see a good chance to improve our KPIs, we try not to hesitate for long before shutting down a project and moving on to another more promising game project. In our case, we managed to show good KPIs and get the green light for Global Launch in 2022.
The Art Style
I would define the game's art style as a mix between stylized and cartoony. The 3D part goes more in the direction of stylized, with the use of simplified texture maps, very saturated colors, and some proportions to better fit the gameplay needs. This applies to both characters and environments. Still, to create a believable world, we tried to keep certain elements on the right scale, like doors and windows, despite having certain buildings clearly off-scale. The amount of detail is set to find a good compromise with different levels of zoom, keeping the buildings readable from distance as well as interesting when observed in close-up views. For instance, to help readability, we made ropes thicker and planks wider than you could have in reality.
Obviously, we had to keep in mind the performance on a wide range of devices, thus we decided to use Vertex Colors instead of diffuse textures and to add details through a specific map containing all the different materials. This solution helped us achieve an appealing result without sacrificing the player’s experience.
When it comes to UI and 2D character portraits, we pushed our style further into cartoon territories, simplifying the rendering to maximize clarity and to clearly separate foreground elements from the background.
The Buildings
Our main goal was to retain the setting as much as possible: to keep a survival vibe, we decided to stress the DIY look. Everything on the island should be made with already existing materials and scrap parts like an airplane turned into storage, part of a boat into the piers, and so on.
The challenge was to keep everything readable and recognizable. One rule we applied was to use strong colors to identify the most important buildings while using more desaturated tones for buildings without a direct gameplay connection. The buildings on which we pushed that rule to the max were the Specialist ones, where players can produce different goods. Those buildings should be visible from far away and easy to memorize, thus we used very strong colors and shapes to help them stand out.
We wanted not to fall victims to our own restrictions; so, we also made the decision to slowly let the building designs become a bit more “urban” the more the players progress throughout the game.
The Island and the Color Palette
From a game design perspective, one clear choice was to give our players maximum freedom when it comes to customizing the main island, including the chance to terraform. Everyone can sculpt the terrain, add water, paint sand or grass. This was creating some tough challenges for both art and tech.
For us, the main hurdle was to create an appealing look at the beginning of the game while having a terrain that is generated at run-time from backend data. This was limiting our ability to have different elevations, placing big rocks, cliffs. The biggest challenge was to have a tile-based terrain that had to look natural. A lot of work went into our terrain shader, finding the sweet spot between usability and look. Same for the water, we had to put a lot of work into our wave generator, making it able to adapt in real-time to every possible island layout.
The vegetation was painted with a custom instancing tool, optimizing the number of draw calls, otherwise, we could not hit the required 30 FPS with the view completely zoomed out.
When it comes to color palette, the grass color must be friendly but not too dominant to distract from more important gameplay. I’d say that we iterated at least 20 times until we found the sweet spot. In the beginning, we used to have more colorful small plants on the island, but we ultimately decided to remove them, as they only created noise. On top of that, we wanted to give the players the chance to decorate with plants and flowers later.
In general, we opted for a fairly saturated palette, with high contrast, to emphasize the buildings. In contrast to other games, we wanted the interactable parts of the environment to feel as important as the UI.
An Ideal Team Member
People with a generalist mindset are more than welcome in our team: obviously, everyone has the main focus, should it be 2D, 3D, animation, but we are looking for artists who are eager to expand their skill set and are able to tackle multiple aspects of game art production. Since we want to keep our team size manageable, it’s important to have a good mix of people with different but overlapping skills.
I would say that having experience in game development is a big plus, especially on mobile. Knowing the limitations, technically and visually, is an important aspect that a lot of people are underestimating.
Another important aspect is being self-organized and with a strong sense of ownership: we want to limit the overhead process as much as possible, thus we need people able to work under low supervision, especially considering the current remote working environment.
Communication skills are crucial: we constantly give and receive feedback, in a very open environment, hence being able to properly address thoughts, as well as constructive feedback, is a very important part of our daily business.
Talking about soft skills, we value them as much as hard skills: being the best artist in the world without being able to work in a team and collaborate with different departments is not helpful. We are looking for a passionate artist, who is able to see the greater vision of a game and is willing to grow with us professionally and personally.
Hiring
We are currently hiring, not only for Lost Survivors but across multiple teams. We have several open art roles that we’d like to fill soon.
Concept art and 3D are our current bottlenecks because we are scaling up 3 projects content-wise and we’d like to increase our capacity.
That said, we have a number of open positions across different departments and different career levels.