We welcome you to a new dev diary. Before we start, we want to thank you for your support and hope you'll find today's entry intriguing. With this late October/early November release, it feels fitting to revisit a topic we introduced in one of our first dev diaries, expanding on it now with more images to share: the most mysterious and alien structures in the Galaxy of Neterun. Keep in mind that everything we show is a work in progress, so some things may change in the final product.
So, let's talk about alien spaces. As introduced in the demo, the galaxy in which Hell Galaxy unfolds is named after an extinct race. When we began developing the environments they left behind, we wanted to combine natural elements with more horrific features, like pierced nests and infected clusters.
We wanted shapes that would make our raiders feel truly lost in a harsh, inhospitable environment, where landmarks are scarce and structures emerging from the sonic matter clouds unsettle rather than comfort. We contrasted these twisted, surreal geometries with natural landmarks to reflect the raiders' own, more familiar structures. Our aim is to convey a remote, hostile space, where life barely survives in bizarre structures, where dangerous galactic creatures nest in the shadows.
Our concepts include wrinkled, layered structures that seem to have formed over time, and columns lost in the mists of an inhospitable world. We crafted spaces that make it hard to gauge scale at a glance, where the distant light of stars, a glimmer of hope, is obscured by looming, menacing structures. Here, clusters of creatures lie in wait, showing no mercy to the unfortunate invaders who dare to enter. These are the structures we use to convey the idea of Neterun as a giant prison, where exile condemns you to a place where hope does not exist and landmarks are lost.
Sonic matter is what keeps these structures and the creatures within them alive, an enigmatic mass made of the forgotten forms of an extinct race and the new infections taking hold of these abandoned remnants. We may be tough on our raiders, but rest assured, there are things in Neterun even crueler than us…
With this spectral goodbye, we close the first November Diary and look forward to sharing more in the next entry.
Farewell, raiders!
