Games Production - Researching Abandoned Facilities

We were sent off by the game designer to gather research for the game. As the idea was that your character was suppose to navigate their way around a research and development facility, I decided to go away and look at what abandonment does to buildings. This was a great piece of research, especially with me being one of the environment artist. It gives me a sense of what the rooms should look like and what the player should experience as they navigate their way around the map.

A real life Abandoned Laboratory.

An Abandoned Barracks in Berlin. 

As we had many different rooms to feature in the level, there was a huge variety in which I had to look at. Not all the rooms look the same, the time has taken its toll on these rooms. One thing we had all decided on is that the rooms have only just been abandoned, with your character being a first response to the attack. This means, unlike some of these rooms, there will be no plant life growing or rust starting to attack the machinery. 

One thing that is common in all of these pictures, is that a story is being told in every aspect of the rooms. You can evidently see something has placed items there and left them to rot, on no fault of their own. If we are to create a realistic experience with this game, then we need to think outside of the box when it comes to placing the assets, not just randomly placing objects hoping that it works. 

A mood-board of Abandoned facilities.

I finally decided to finish this part of the research by creating a mood board which looked at many different rooms, whether in an actual video game, or in real life, that had been abandoned. This is so that I could get an idea of what the effect abandonment had on our facility. One thing that is a common occurrence is the use of light so that the player has a way point to follow. Also many dark tones have been used. Staying away from the regular bright shades that many clean facilities have.

This has been a great process as I now have an idea of what the game will look like. It has also given me an idea of what makes all these images so captivating and how we can incorporate into the environment.  Also if we want to save on tri's, a modular environment needs to be constructed and in the abandoned space station images, we would have to construct one piece of a wall and then repeat over to construct our environment.