Arenus - State of the Game

Hey Folks!

Today we're going to show you how far we've come with Arenus! This post will be focused on revealing a lot of behind the scenes information about the production of our next game. 

Of course its important for us to say that without your support, none of the stuff detailed in this post would be possible. We hope you enjoy taking a look at how far we’ve come on our next big title.

We started the pre-production on Arenus in September 2016. As with many projects this size we’ve had some rough times and good times but in the end we've now got a team that will make sure that Arenus will have the release it deserves.

Art Direction

One of the biggest changes that happened to Arenus was a change of the Lead Artist. Back in Early 2017 we've had to find a new lead artist because of time problems with the current one back then.  

When we looked at what we wanted to accomplish with Arenus we knew that if posisble, we wanted to have a uniform artstyle for our game. This was definitely a challenge but in the end we’re very happy with the person who decided to take up this challenge.

Before Arenus, Menoziriath was working on art for Roundscape. After working with them for a bit and liking their artistic skill and work ethic, we decided to ask them to help us bring Arenus to life. They agreed and after many months on Arenus, our picture count, including variations, is over 300 images. 

Another change that deserves a mention is that instead of faceart, as in Roundscape, Arenus will include detailed body art during dialogue. Being able to see the Face of the NPC you talk to is a nice thing, it gives you a small direction how the character may look like. But in Arenus you'll be able to see the whole character as you interact with them.

Everything you’ve seen and will see in Arenus is completely custom made, no asset packs and no character generators. Creating a game with completely custom assets was a new challenge for us. For the first time we've hired pixel artists to help create unique pixel art for our characters and maps. 

Compared to Roundscape where we only needed a few character animations, this has been something much larger to tackle. It has been a challenge, but I think we’ve created a good workflow and having these custom assets is totally worth it.  

Managing the design and creation of these assets has required us to step up our game from Roundscape, but we are up to the task and believe our fans will enjoy the new improvement we’ve worked so hard on.  

The last point I’d like to talk about is maps. As pure assets they look great but ingame something was missing. Animation. Designing a believeable city for a sci-fi world means things should look alive, colorful and busy. 

Flashing lights, shuttles in the background, amd smoke are just a few of the must haves to make our maps stand out. To make this happen, we've taken extra effort to customize the engine and make this possible without any FPS drops.

Perfomance is very important for us this time, we know that Roundscape can easily run up to one Gigabyte RAM usage. Arenus runs in Full HD but at the moment it never goes higher than 600 MB which we're really proud of. To make this possible we're working with a pre-loader, a custom cache and many visual tricks that should keep things running smooth.

UI Mechanics

Our characters and maps aren’t the only things that are unique. Once we started working on the mechanics of the game we decided to build a custom User Interface for Arenus. It's very important for us to create an immersive experience with the game. 

For the User Interface we've got the idea that it should feel as if you're using a sci-fi terminal. It took several attempts and the first ones were pretty bad. Fortunately we've found a style that fits the game. Not only does it look good, its still fast and easy to use just like a solid UI should be. 

That's it for now folks. We've hope you found this post interesting and I want to take this moment to mention that everything you just read and saw is possible because of your support. 

Everyday you make it possible for us to create this game and to do it indepdently. For that we want to thank you!

Follow Arenus on Steam for the newest information regarding its release. 

See you folks later this month with a new RS patch. 

- The Arvus Games Team