Megan Fox

So I Had A Rock Realization

Added 2022-10-07 19:30:57 +0000 UTC

So I'm working on rocks. Yeah I know, super boring, but. Come on, this is an open world video game. There Will Be Rocks.

These aren't my rocks exactly, these are Quixel asset store things. Apparently they're coral? Cool! Sure, I can see that

Know what else they are? DEAD RINGERS FOR EVERY SINGLE ROCK IN DEATH STRANDING. I was just running around testing my IK on them, and it was like, waaaaait a sec, I know these rocks. Or at least the texture of these rocks.

It's a neat bit of holistic aesthetic design too, because it means that Death Stranding didn't just have beaches as a concept and a thing you go to sometimes. They took the concept of beaches and kinda brushed it back to incorporate into the whole game.

They'd probably say their game is Iceland-inspired, and it is, by and large. But it also isn't. Stuff feels weirdly, nautical. Like the cryptobiote? Come on, Kojima, you can't fool me, that thing is just a brine shrimp. The pickup points of them even have them swimming around like they do, eyyyyy, in shallow water like at a beach.

Anyhoo, this weird little realization has given us a fun realization of how we can go about designing our world. So now we're doing this whole process of, ok, so our game is about X, right? Well ok, what stuff in the real material world relates to X? What matches that vibe? How can we pull that backwards aesthetically so the whole game is that lil bit more tied together?

It's neat! That's all. I'm not going anywhere with this. I just think it's neat that Death Stranding rocks are just, coral, and that sort of everything in that game is thus a dry beach, and that's just. Neat! Aesthetic cohesion, I love it! I wanna do it! So we gonna try and do it.