Welcome to the first Dev Diary of December. While your production team is hard at work making the exile of raiders in Neterun as dreadful as possible, we like to check in with you now and then to share what we’ve been working on. For today's entry, we want to delve deeper into the mysterious race that once inhabited Galaxy of Neterun: the Neterunians.
During the design phase, imagining what the Neterunians might have left behind was an inspiring process. In the first dev diary of November, we showcased some of their ancient structures, and today, we’re continuing down that path.
One of our primary goals is to ensure that you feel a true sense of discovery when navigating the treacherous spirals of Neterun. This mirrors the experience of the first Imperial explorers who ventured into Neterun, before the raiders arrived.
When designing these structures, we aimed to evoke both a sense of wonder and an air of mystery. We also put significant effort into the materials associated with these monuments. Our vision was to create a blend of rocky and organic textures, infused with sonic matter that flows like lifeblood, illuminating the monuments and making them visible from great distances, beacons in the galactic nebula.
The neterunian structures are designed to tell stories simply through their presence. They invite discovery, leaving players with unanswered questions or intriguing interruptions in an organic narrative where the environment itself is a storyteller.
This storytelling extends to the raider colonies as well. What are the organic structures that now infect them? Or, from another perspective, what lies beneath the impure metal structures, such as the stations, mines, excavators, and wreckage? What secrets are buried below? As we’ve shown in previous diaries, we paid attention to the violent integration between metal and rock in these environments.
The Human Empire, ever opportunistic, repurposed the ancient neterunian structures to build their colonies, sonic matter extraction sites, and other facilities. In doing so, they transformed Neterun into what it is today: a massive prison, haunted by ghosts and riddled with dangers. It's a cannibalization of something ancient and unknowable, something dead for who knows how long, save for the vivid green sonic matter that still pulses through these structures…
And that brings us to the end of this dev diary. We look forward to sharing more about our perilous galaxy in the next entry.
Farewell, raiders!
