Breathing Life Into Our Environments

Broken Roads takes place within a post-apocalyptic Australia, beautifully rendered in hand-painted stylized art that feels like a painting come to life. However, in the progress of realizing this world, bringing it to life for players involves far more than just having characters walk around environments. Life after the apocalypse might sound bleak, but it's still alive and vibrant in many ways - and not only those that want to kill you. In this dev blog, Broken Roads’ VFX artist Ryan Gee takes us through a number of the techniques and solutions we’re working into the game at the moment.

Wildlife

As it's set in Australia, a country known for its insects and animals, wildlife is certainly a core part of bringing Broken Roads to life. Having an environment that reacts to your presence both feels more realistic and immersive, as well as encourages exploration and discovery.

Grasshoppers springing from tall grass or bushes, various insects and reptiles wandering around their respective ecosystems – all of these contribute to crafting a world that feels alive and dynamic to players. And while you may encounter some animals that would prefer you dead, not everything in the outback is necessarily an enemy: many are just doing regular animal and insect things. 

Even simple effects, such as having grasshoppers fly away when disturbed, help make a world feel alive.

Having creatures respond to light sources such as torches, lamps, and campfires helps to drive home the nitty gritty details of the world, all the while seeing the wind blowing through what would otherwise be static environments and scenes.

No quiet night around a campfire would feel complete without some moths fluttering around the flames.

Annoying cluster flies are a key factor to getting the full impact of the Broken Roads Experience

You’ll also find unique fauna in each environment you explore, including snakes, lizards, spiders, and other creepy crawlies that will keep you on your toes.

Some animals have no quarrel with you, but be wary of those who might

Lighting

Broken Roads uses a dynamic lighting system for different times of the day or night. Despite everything in our world being entirely hand painted, every prop in Broken Roads is also a 3D object, allowing us to light every scene dynamically and realistically.

Night-time in Merredin

Keep an eye out for campfires, lampposts, light strings, and any other light sources people may have been able to find in the apocalypse! To make the world feel cohesive and lived in, we use a combination of pre-calculated and real-time lighting, shadows, and occlusion to merge everything together into a beautifully crafted, intricate world for you to explore.

Breakdown of the key steps for lighting outdoors in Broken Roads

While lighting is beautiful, it's only one part of making a world feel dynamic. The real world is constantly in motion and reacts to you, which is an important part of making a virtual world beautiful and interesting to explore.

Wind and Cloth

Lastly, to help bring our characters and environments to completion, we use both a dynamic wind system for our environments and cloth simulation for our characters. You’ll be able to see gusts of wind move through bushes, trees, tents, strings of lights, and just about anything else in the world. This adds a finishing touch of realism to each location, and helps tie together all aspects of the environment into a truly dynamic and responsive world.

Depending on each environment, wind might stir up rolling dust clouds or ground mist, and in the harshest weather may even produce full-scale rolling dust storms to challenge even the hardiest survivors.

Those you encounter in the world of Broken Roads will often be dressed in whatever they can find, and both your companions and other NPCs will have dynamic clothing that moves and flows with them.

A rare behind the scenes look at our cloth and exclusive FloppyHatTech

We have even spent some time working on dedicated emu feather tech for more realistic movement and feathers. And yes, there will be floppy hats. We hear you.

 As a VFX and technical artist at Drop Bear Bytes, I'm thrilled at the chance to help bring this beautiful and unique setting into vibrant, moving life for you to explore! Keep an eye out on for more on Twitter, Instagram, and future dev blogs right here.

-      Ryan Gee