ABSENT LOG Dev Update 6/15/2025

The past month we have been locked in almost exclusively on getting out assets for maintenance done. So we are a bit sparse of new raw content, or significant bug fixes, to show off.

Regardless, it's still good to keep things up to date and give you guys a deeper dive into what's going on behind the scenes.



As mentioned at the start, Maintenance has been our biggest priority. Although maintenance is not a singular level, it is a set of assets that will be present throughout the majority of the ship, especially within sections where levels will connect with each other. It was also important to get it out of the way now as major elements of Maintenance will be part of our campaign demo.

“Maintenance has sort of become my baby for the project, or atleast at its current state. A lot of back and forth between Tekka and I facilitated a proper direction and flow for assets. Given that it is the “guts” of the ship, it's visually and thematically meant to be very warm and flesh colored. As mentioned in our last update, Maintenance also worked as our first attempt at testing out a “grid” layout approach. This has proved tremendously useful as it allows us to quickly and efficiently vary up details and layouts on the fly without having to make too many bespoke rooms or modules.



An interesting thing of note was that we found that with some slight scaling adjustments, some of these grid parts could be used for ceiling or wall components, even if not strictly designed for that. 

Another thing of note is that after hitting a certain threshold of work done, things really started to move exponentially faster. At the start, there is a lot of uncertainty and you are trying to get some basic shapes down, but once you have a sort of flow that you follow, everything starts to feel second nature. You start to just naturally see new shapes and details that you can add and it becomes much quicker and intuitive to do so. I can only imagine as more level assets get fleshed out and finished, this will move by even faster.

For a short anecdote, I realized after making the base components for the walls and flooring, that there were natural elements that I could quickly make to flesh out these areas a little bit more. One item in particular I was very excited about was a modular industrial pipe component. I designed these to stay in line with our 2 meter scaling rule, and created multiple modules, such as a 45 degree corner pipe, a 90 degree corner pipe, and an extended linear pipe. From here I made sure that the textures had enough scalability to maintain a decent amount of visual quality and could be tiled seamlessly for whatever length is needed.

Another thing that became clear is that flooring and wall panels, even with varied components, can quickly become visually repetitive. In order to break this up,I looked at some of the alphas that Tekka had made. Originally these were just for use in Substance Painter and texture sheets, but I had the idea of creating decals with normal mapping to use as detailing stickers.



The setup was fairly simple, it required separating the B&W colors to an alpha channel, generating a normal map from Photoshop, and pulling everything together within a decal component in the engine. I've made 2 separate sets for each alpha, a line art panel, and a colored panel.

As an addition, I have used this same exact approach for making grunge decals. These will be used to add a layer of weathering, dirt and grime where it is needed. I have also used this to create “fake lighting,” such as volumetric effects, or light bleeds from crevices..

These decals can be placed and scaled to any surface and it works on a projection model as opposed to a flat plane. They are very light on performance, react to lighting, are easily scalable, versatile and will make detailing and adding finishing touches to levels much quicker and more efficient.

Biggest thing is to start adding in some level specific props, such as tools, workstations, ambient details like scattered papers, and various crates and equipment. As we start to implement these, I believe we will have a much stronger presentation for environmental storytelling.”

-Loom

ART ASSETS:

Detail Stamps

"I'm a bit light on presentable content this month, but what I've got is one of the things that helps us build levels faster and better as it develops. You might have already seen some fruits of this as Loom has been documenting his progress getting it implemented in-engine: A series of stamps for simulated 3d detail, tailor-made to ALOG's design style.

I recently completed our first batch of these, based on sketches that Loom and I collaborated on a couple months back. Something I wanted to make sure of when we were getting ready to move into level production was that we would have certain details like panel latches that would remain consistent throughout the game world. This will help areas of the ship to feel unified as part of a whole, even with some pretty varied theming between levels.

On a technical level these are pretty fun to produce, as I'm really just painting height maps that can be imported into both our texturing suite as brushes, and into the engine itself to make use of Unreal's robust decal system, and be read as 3d information for lighting purposes. Some of the stamps are simple enough that only one is needed for both the 3d shape and the lines, while the more intricate ones typically have the height information and the lines separated into two stamps with identical dimensions.

I'll be producing more batches of these as we go, as every detail we can turn into a little pre-made element like this speeds up our work."

-Tekka