We’ve started the private beta test of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, and our first playtesters are kicking so much ass! If you’d like to join, swing by the Finji Discord, get your Exocolonist Fan role, and apply to be a tester on the #exocolonist-beta-opt-in channel. We’ll be adding new testers every couple weeks and working together to make this game the best it can be.
Sarah Northway: When I started Exocolonist, I had only a vague idea what I wanted its characters to look like. I knew the setting: a small colony ship leaves earth in the late 21st century, spends 20 years in space, then lands on an uninhabited alien planet.
I grew up with Star Trek, but I didn’t want a Utopian society with all its problems solved, or the Enterprise with its clean uniforms and military discipline. I wanted pioneers, free thinkers, explorers, refugees, taken from all over the world with different cultures and ideas. What they have in common is their desire to get the hell away from Earth’s problems and start over.
And their children: born in space, augmented with stolen genetech, sheltered from the strict society of Earth and outfitted by textile replicators (probably also stolen). What would they look like? How would they dress?
My original map sprites for the dateable characters
I started with color scheme. Every location has a color (Geoponics = green, Command = blue, Garrison = red, etc), and every character is associated with a location. Cal’s in green because he wants to be a farmer. Marz in blue because she wants to run things. Soldiers wear uniforms (red) and explorers have environmental suits with strips of safety orange.
Still Sarah Northway: In a colony of 100 open-minded people from different backgrounds, there’d be less pressure to fit in. So I thought about how I’d have dressed as a teen if I could have done anything. It was… a lot. My design doc listed everything from face tattoos and AR glasses to colorful dreadlocks and beads. It touched on cyberpunk, burning man, scene kids and hippie culture. And I imagined a mix of newly printed nylon and plastics, plus worn and patched old fabric (the textile replicators are slow and break down).
Then I threw everything out the window because I couldn’t draw characters worth a damn and this was never going to work if I did the art myself.
Enter Mei…
Meilee Chao: I was so stunned to be approached by Sarah about Exocolonist that it took several conversations to realize that I was being invited as the character artist and not just the character designer. I really couldn’t believe my luck that I could be designing characters for my favorite genre of games, new as I was to the game development scene.
The game concept sounded right up my alley as a player, but in spite of my excitement and desire to draw kissable characters I had initial concerns about the world and my ability to vibe with the prompt. The genre of sci-fi is something as unexplored to me as the planet of Vertumna is for the colony. A little cyberpunk here and there is about as far as I dabbled in that particular direction before I start wandering back towards the comforts of modern fantasy and JRPG impracticality.
boots ‘n straps ‘n boots ‘n straps ‘n…
However, after going through the wonderfully-colorful design documents and moodboards, I was quickly finding that the initial concepts for the Exo characters were different than the deep space, mechanical concept art I’m frequently intimidated by on ArtStation. After pouring over the documents and collections and taking my own notes, I started my own moodboard that could bridge the gap between what I responded to and the beautiful mass of ideas I was given.
Before long, the Pinterst I pulled together could be described as a holosexual, leather-queer’s dream with a splash of disgruntled visual kei. The avant garde nature of the images formed its own futuristic nature while it overlapped just enough with my comfort zone that I could see a cast taking shape in my mind’s eye. I was down for it.
A few pins from Mei’s moodboard
A few tentative concepts later, styles and conventions started coming together quickly. With each set of concepts, the colony’s society began to focus into something unique and still functional for the setting. Blessedly, Sarah responded so well to the quirkiness of the concepts and encouraged me to go even weirder if it suited me.
I feel my inexperience with classic and contemporary sci-fi, in the end, was more of an asset to the process than a handicap. The spectrum of prompts provided were a great road map for the game, and allowed myself and my experiences to draw more inspiration from other genres and my personal favorite design features. It allowed me to delve deeper into the Exocolonist lore without ideas from other pop series with me. Additionally, using my talented and tasteful friends as a target audience helped validate the designs of the dateables by using aesthetics that appealed to them. It’s one thing if I want to date them, but I’d love for the cast to be appealing to all sorts of tastes.
I think the best part of this whole experience is creating a cast that the dev finds both lovable and hot. Nothing is more rewarding than that. I love these characters to bits, and I hope they get many smooches from future players of Exocolonist!
The art of Exocolonist has been getting so much positive feedback! Folks dig it.
It’s been a long road. When I started this game I had the audacious idea that I’d do the art myself. I amassed a considerable Pinterest mood board, collecting any picture that felt like part of the Exocolonist art puzzle. I went through a phase of thinking it might look like a campy pulp fiction cover crossed with child’s finger painting (but with glitter!).
I spent weeks trying to find a style that I could do quickly with my limited abilities, but as the project grew and the idea of dateable characters became a must-have, I realized I didn’t have the skills to draw characters you could fall in love with (or be remotely attracted to). Plus it would have added more time to an already long development schedule. But some of the creatures were cool.
My original art style tests
I decided it’d be best to find someone who already worked in the style I was looking for, whatever that was. I went hunting. I found Sarah Webb at the VanCAF comic fest where she was showing Kochab. I loved her environments, her casual but undeniably living line work, and her rich color schemes. I’d never seen anyone who could make snow so colorful.
Sarah soon joined on to work on the concept art and help find a style that was both hers and Exocolonists’.
Sarah Webb’s concept art for Quiet season
I loved that Sarah did some of her work with pencil and watercolor, and other times it was completely digital, and hard to tell the difference. This was the look I wanted, both for the fullscreen illustrations and the environments on the area maps where you run around between events. Sarah shared her Photoshop brushes and techniques for getting that look.
Next Meilee Chao came on to design and illustrate our characters (more on them in future posts) and has also done a fantastic job adapting the concept art to a waving, breathing alien jungle. It’s like talking a stroll through a watercolor painting.
I added a wave shader, particles, fog, and depth blur to the 2d sprites in Pollen season
We haven’t shied away from the colors pink and purple in this game, even though I’ve been known to personally reject them as “too girly” in my own life and wardrobe. Exocolonist isn’t meant to appeal only to women; I just think it’s a cool and underused palette. It also fits the science: most plants on the planet Vertumna photosynthesize using a red pigment instead of a green one.
I’ll talk about other aspects of the art – the characters, creatures, 3d elements, and UI – in future posts. For now I’ll leave you with our newest team member Eduardo Vargas’ event backgrounds. Sarah Webb has moved on to other projects, but Ed is doing a fantastic job matching her style!
Update: We’ve received a surprising number of submissions from many many talented artists! I’m going to shut this down while we go through them all. Thanks everyone for spreading the word!
Exocolonist is looking for an illustrator for contract work. Mainly to work on the background art for dialog scenes. Sarah Webb started us off with plenty of amazing concept art, as well as part of the backgrounds we need. We were sad to see her go – you can follow her exciting new work at Cartoon Network here!
So we are looking to match an existing style:
Beautiful, right? I love these sooooo much.
There are another 20-30 illustrations left to do (more if we have to redraw the existing ones). This might be something like 3-6 months of full time work, or up to a year part time, working remotely.
Update: I’ll let you know when we have new background art to show!
This was originally posted on the Oculus blog for International Women’s day in March 2019.
At 17, I applied for my first ever tech job with the words “jack of all trades” at the top of my resume. I figured this was a good thing; it meant I was flexible and good at everything I did. Employers, unsurprisingly, saw it as a mark of aimlessness, and a career adviser told me to pick one thing and focus on it.
I chose my greatest love, programming, and in the fullness of time I got pretty decent at it. But I wanted more: to invent, craft systems, write, illustrate and design graphics. So after 10 years as a coder, I quit and went indie.
Sunlight in the tropics made me squint… worth it!
My husband Colin and I spent 5 years traveling the world and making our own small independent games. My first game Rebuild was hugely successful, and solo: I’d done all the design, writing, code, and art myself. It was a flat 2d game of course, because I wouldn’t touch 3d models with a 10 foot pole. I’d taken stabs at all the software – 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, ZBrush – and bounced off each one. I couldn’t get my head around the camera angles; I’d wreck things in the Z axis while working in the X and Y. Watching professionals, I felt I’d need years just to memorize all the hotkeys required to use those tools effectively. I swore I’d never make a 3d game.
Until… VR.
Tilt Brush to be exact. I tried a private demo, waving my arms around to paint great huge solid lines of light. I was completely taken by the medium. My husband was too, and we immediately switched gears and teamed up with Radial Games to write Fantastic Contraption VR, a puzzle game where you grab and snap tinker-toy-like pieces together to make lifesized vehicles. It used those same large arm movements we found so neat in Tilt Brush.
Don Piano by Sarah Northway, Tilt Brush + Audio, 2017
I stayed deeply into Tilt Brush. Some of the early sample art packaged with it was mine. And I’m not – well, I had never considered myself to be an artist. I just found it so incredibly intuitive and easy to use. If you want to draw a line from here to there, you just… move your arm from here to there. Nothing like the frustrations I’d had with traditional 3d modeling software.
I wondered if I could make art assets for a VR game inside VR, and the answer was oh yes you can!
After some experimenting with tools like Medium, Quill, and MasterpieceVR, I discovered Gravity Sketch, and used it to make a little (unreleased) game about gardening on an alien planet. I modeled while sitting cross-legged on my bed, scaling and rotating the object in front of me as I tweaked it, leaning over it to see details, scaling it up to get a sense of how it would feel in the game. The hand motions in Gravity Sketch are so natural, and the basic functions – draw, move, rotate, copy, undo, all mapped to a different button to make creation flow so effortlessly.
I’ve seen the future of 3d modeling, and this is it.
Along the way Colin and I found ourselves in the VR community, and time and again we were intrigued by the incredible art being created. Like Cabbibo’s liquid iridescent creatures made from math, Liz Edward’s paintings which become your whole world when you step into them, or Sean Tann’s interactive rainbow experiments.
VR is a new artistic medium, and the artists experimenting it are wonderfully unbounded in their ideas. We wanted to help connect these artists and share their creations with the world, which is what brought us to create The Museum of Other Realities.
MOR lobby featuring Fruit Tree by Sarah Northway, Gravity Sketch, 2017.
Initially, the MOR was a series of self-enclosed art experiences by a variety of VR-centric artists, joined together via a lobby area with entrances to each one. Entirely digital, the lobby was styled as a traditional brick-and-mortar art gallery with neutral white walls and smaller pieces of art on pedestals.
We thought it’d be neat to make the lobby area multiplayer, so visitors could get that legit museum vibe while watching strangers come and go, or chatting with friends before and after the experiences. The MOR – still in early alpha – began holding monthly “release” parties where all the artists logged on from their respective VR rigs to check out the new exhibit and connect with each other.
Gradually, the separate experiences fell away and the lobby took over the entire project. Today the MOR (still in alpha) contains nearly 100 works from 30 artists. There are full-room art pieces which move and flow around you, interactive dance halls with ribbons of color, tiny dioramas you can teleport down into, a bar and cocktails you can clink, mysterious floating alien jellyfish, motion captured musicians, photogrammetry villages, wearable dresses, roaring dinosaurs, laughing skeletons, spaceships, and at least a couple Sarah Northway originals, made in Tilt Brush.
I have since moved on to my next thing, but Colin and a growing team are still working on the Museum of Other Realities – beta version now available. If you are a VR artist and want to be involved, please get in touch!
