It's nice to poke our heads out of our dangerous galaxy every now and then and give you a glimpse into our creative processes. The raiders, in their hybrid machine state, occasionally beg for mercy, but we are relentless and continue to put dangers in their path.
Today, we want to talk to you specifically about raiders, focusing on the creative process behind designing their bodies. Keep in mind, as you know, that the material we share with you is still a work in progress.
A raider's body is developed based on gameplay, narrative, and artistic needs. Take, for example, the E-Was class that you can fight in the demo and that we briefly introduced in one of our first dev diaries.
E-Was raiders start with a well-defined narrative concept. Those of you who have played the demo know that a raider is created through Extraction, a process in which the raider's mind is transferred to a biomechanical medium, the starship. This process usually goes well (although it is said to be painful), but sometimes things go wrong during installation. Thus, an E-Was is born.
These broken minds do not pass the post-installation checks, so they are discarded and abandoned in the dumps found in some areas of the raider colonies. The concepts we wanted to translate into raider form were the broken mind and the death of a machine, the death of its parts. So, we imagined real carcasses, ships made of discarded parts and ruined by time.
Antennas that no longer work, rusty weapons, old sheet metal, makeshift shields, metal grills surrounding old engines. We wanted models that, at first glance, would remind you of something ruined and abandoned, malfunctioning machines that suddenly reawaken. How does a biomechanical being decay? Our answer is the E-Was ships.
A broken mind, reactivated by mysterious processes, stuck forever in an old piece of metal. To express this in gameplay terms, we created slow and dangerous raiders, moving in groups and firing blocks of bullets, as if they were "restless" raiders. We imagined minds that suddenly wake up and find themselves in a hallucinated nightmare, the Galaxy of Neterun, where they can do nothing but fight.
And that’s all for today! Your passionate team says goodbye and looks forward to seeing you in the next dev diary.
Farewell, raiders!
