Hey there!

As usual, we have continued the development of the UI as well as worked on the new art design for the game. This week we’ll take a closer look at some of the new assets.

New Design Direction

As already mentioned last week, we are revamping the design of the game as part of the 3D transition. Bio Colonies originally started out as a 2D game and slowly grew more complex. In the current version, we have implemented a full 3D voxel-based terrain. So, naturally we had to adapt the design as well.

The Goal

Our goal with the new design is to induce the right atmosphere to the players, but also keep it simple enough so that we (and later modders) can handle the workload to create assets.

As our game takes place in the future, inside a simulation of the human body, we want to transmit exactly this atmosphere: The feeling of microbes swarming around, nanobots working, blood flowing, and everything as a digital representation. Getting this right is hard.

As a team of only 3 people with limited knowledge in the field of 3D game development, we can’t really deliver a photo-realistic game. But in our opinion, it wouldn’t even be fitting for Bio Colonies. Think about it. The insides of a human body are not exactly pretty to look at. Abstracting this and making it feel more like a simulation will improve the overall feeling of the game.

Of course, we’re not fully there yet. To reach this goal we’ll need many more iterations in the future, but we’re making small steps towards it.

So let’s get into the current status. Again, keep in mind that this is still work-in-progress and doesn’t represent the final version.

Terrain

The terrain is made up of many many hexagons. This is then merged and small elevations are converted into slopes. This is what you can see above. We want to add different terrain types, like soft and hard tissue, and features, like caves and hills, to the game later on.

Cells

Cells are the buildings of Bio Colonies. They are stationary and serve a certain purpose. In the game, we want to display them as an organic structure with a technical part on top of it. In the image, we have an example design of the Breeder Cell on the right. The glowing light represents the team color for easy distinction.

The holographic cell is a blueprint. When a player wants to build a new cell, they first place down the blueprint for it and it’s displayed as hologram until construction finished.

Swarms

Microbes always move in swarms. They go from one cell to another to get processed further, used for construction and research, or attack the enemy. The color of the Microbes represents the team. The shape is defined by the type.

Bots

Bots are the most advanced unit in the game. They can move and usually do pretty useful things like terraforming. We want to portray them as tiny robots. In the image above, you can see the base of a future bot. The small legs will be the main way of movement for it. The full model isn’t finished at the time of writing, so we can’t show it yet.

Next Steps

Next week, we’ll continue working on the UI and start implementing the first assets into the game. We’ll continue to post new images of the designs on our Twitter account, so be sure to follow us there!

See ya next week!