Taking reference from what has come before with a variety of sources such as;
CONCEPT ART FROM PINTEREST
Primarily looking at the scale of spaceships used in these images and how they interact with the landscape after crash landing, not necessarily the mediums used or colours or anything like that.
PHOTOGRAPHY OF ICELANDIC AND OTHER VOLCANIC LANDSCAPES
I don't want the planet to have volcanic activity, though that could be representative of the anger stage of grief. I find that fire and lava outbursts are overused as a way of signifying anger in an environment also the planet isn't going through anger. These locations however offer up desolate landscapes peppered with unusual almost alien rock formations to the majority of us who have never observed these places which is the feel I wish to recreate on the planet in this game.
OIL RIGS AND HUGE QUARRY OPERATIONS
Since my game takes place on a planet with an unmanned mining operation I leaned into other mechanical operations that required enormous pieces of equipment when scouring for resources and reference imagery. I started with oil rigs due to their large scale drilling operations tunneling deep into the ground - similar to mining an alien planet for its resources, however with photographs on board a oil rig hard to come by I looked into documentaries and video footage before watching gameplay footage of an actual game set aboard an oil rig "Still wakes the deep". One interesting feature of this was the use of bright yellow colours to not only signify where the player should go but often used to paint safety features like edes of ledges and ladders etc - leaning into the repetitive theme that it was guiding the player to safety. This could be utilised to press the player forward through the mining machinery in my project and through the signifier of anger since as my previous post evidenced that we must pass through and allow ourselves to feel anger during a grief event not avoid it.
Another large-scale operation was quarries that would often be located in barren environments and bear a resemblance to the environment I was hoping to create too.
Spacegooose (Eric Geusz) is a software engineer by trade but has made a name for themself as an illustrator on Instagram with the unusual ability to turn anything into a space ship, this observational ability can be an experimental tactic to put together rudimentary shapes that I like to form the basis of my own spaceships or alien topography/machinery.
Using all these reference points to sketch out thumbnails and other rough pieces of environmental art to get a feel of what I want the landscape to look like, they can then be taken forwards with all the different mediums I wish to experiment with being efficient with my use of time as the sketches can be used multiple times for a better use of comparing and contrasting the different stylistic outcomes of the practical experimentation.
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