Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind die Jäger!

If someone doesn't know where that phrase is from, it's from the opening theme of Attack on Titan... and you can tell why I chose it :}

As you know, it's our goal to portray creatures of our game as living beings, and not just a pile of moving polygons on screen - that is why I modelled muscles, organs, and skeleton. And I think it's a perfect time to talk about some spookeh scareh skeletonhs, after all, halloween is incoming! 

Everyone can agree that it's not common (and definitely not healthy) to see your own skeleton or skinless muscles in real life, so you might wonder why I'm going into such great detail about internal anatomy in a game that is about simulating life as well. 

So the question is when does player ever see the internals of a creature? Simple answer, there are two big special cases when that happens: on construction and on deconstruction of a creature. 

When creature travels through the Gateway, matter doesn't travel across the Realities, only their consciousness arrives at the visualized destination. To get into the physical plane of the new Reality, they need to get a vessel for their consciousness upon arrival either by being born, or assembling their own body out of matter and atoms.

Think about Fifth Element, 3d printers, Westworld, Fallout 4 Institute, or other media which shows creation of a body... In our game this process happens when character is respawned, changes appearance, or swaps the body to another species entirely - the old body is deconstructed and the new one is constructed.

Alternatively, the deconstruction happens when a player decides to kill another creature and harvest their body for skin, meat and bones. Usually in games it's either body just magically disappears, or it's displayed in a very violent way. In our case, with those anatomy models, it gives a realistic expression of how it would look like, while it doesn't display it in a gorey fashion - its like an anatomy book illustration.

Surely, things like that happen only occasionally in the game, but the effects like these provide great exposition, they are designed suspend the disbelief of creatures being "just a pile of polygons". 

If you were to ask me, internal anatomy is just beautiful. It's not something that has to always be related to medicine, food, or death... It's something more, it's something that gives us ability to see, feel, experience the world... In other words - it gives us life. 

Or maybe it's just me, seeing beauty where there isn't one, maybe I have issues...

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That's all the text for now! I'll leave you with a bunch of screenshots of the textured game models, coming up in the future game builds.