Visuals are one of the most fundamental aspects of a great game.

It goes without saying that Dark Frontiers has captivated many of its followers because of the dark, claustrophobic style of the visuals.

Having interviewed the music devs a while ago, it was time for the art team to spill the beans on all things visual!

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DF: What were your first ideas when you started working on Dark Frontiers? Are there any sci-fi books or movies that inspired the aesthetics you are giving to the game?

AT: Initially our inspiration for the look and feel were movies Prometheus and Dune.

That’s why Dark Frontiers has more than just a plain and empty moon surface. — We included most of all possible biomes: desert, wet and dark moon, for a more classic approach, alien-plant biome with flora, and a “bloody horror” biome, that has a touch of gore aspect to it, creepy, fleshy, inspired by Dead Space.

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DF: What are you looking forward to more, when it comes to graphic designing in DF? Creatures, flora, accessories? Is there a particular zone you are looking forward to working on?

AT: The Graphic part of the game comes parallel with development. That’s why we don’t add new GUI (Game user interface) as often as we could. It takes lots of time and testing to move into shaping game mechanics visually.

We have a partially small but very strong modeling team, which brings cool enemy creeps and props to life. It’s always a nice relief to see what we’ve done at the end of each month. We believe that in the upcoming half a year, we will make a huge step forward with visual game content.

The next big thing that we are excited for is obviously Boss Npcs creation and development — this feature should nicely shape the social and team aspect of playing.

At the moment, we are working on rock, desert and mold biomes. The one that is going to require a lot of time and attention is the contaminated/gore area. The vision for this biome is pretty big: we imagine abandoned and destroyed space cities infected with alien flesh and gore-stuff around. It’s going to be more of an alien-made environment rather than a natural/organic planetary surface.

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DF: As a gamer, what are your favorite sci-fi games, and why?

AT: Half-Life, Dead Space, Star Citizen.

Half life has a pretty classical, but amazing story.

Deadspace for the horror aspect of the game.

Star Citizen for its vast sci-fi world you can explore.

And of course, as a team of mmorpg fans, we all love good old RuneScape. That’s why we took a handcrafted game path, a world with many interactible objects, quests, items and enemies around.

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DF: During the streamathon, our followers were able to see the pre alpha of DF and bits of gameplay. What are your aims towards what the final product is going to look like? What mood are you going for?

AT: The pre Alpha was just a glimpse of what we are planning to build. It was more for us to check if it’s even possible to make a semi-open world rpg game in a sci-fi environment with limited resources, rather than giving it out for the community to play. It’s pretty rare for games to give the chance to test and play a game that is this early into development.

We saw that core mechanics were implemented and the community enjoyed exploring and shooting.

We are aiming to create a simple but fun, replayable RPG experience with crafting, skilling, fighting, boss raiding, team building and social aspects. Our initial mood for the game is grimy, murky, eerie, brutalist and dark with a touch of gore.

The art direction is also shaping up with time. So there will be slight style changes in time. We are also aiming to bring a strong social aspect to the game, so it’s going to be fun not just for hardcore RPG fans.

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DF: Can you give us a little sneak peek of something cool you’ve been working on lately?

AT: Currently we are working heavily on enemy NPC creation. We plan to use unique toggleable parts for every enemy character. This way we will be able to create extra looks and forms, size and color variations for the enemies. Here are just a couple examples of enemy NPCs and their “tiers”:

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DF: What is your opinion on the state of play 2 earn games at the moment? Is there still a long way to go?

AT: Play 2 earn is a pretty old concept for gaming. Games have already employed this system many years ago. Obviously now, it’s more of a “boom/mania/trend” than before. As to how it will shape the game industry, we only can speculate, but that it will bring many “pros” to the players and the games itselves, that’s just inevitable. Dark Frontiers is a long term project, but we are moving very fast in shaping it.

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