Hey followers, today let's talk about gak! I love the idea of not just showing you something, but explaining why we have it, so let's try that now 🙂 Gak is a term we borrowed from our old art director at Visceral Games, Ian Milham. If you search for the term, nothing related to our use comes up, so we'll have to ask him where he got it. It's become a part of Amanda's Art Bible, and to quote that document exactly, what we mean is "contrast of a few large shapes with a few mediums and lots [and lots and lots] of smaller details". Gak is all the girders hanging down, and the ropes swinging, and the random fins and propellers and gears and flaps and everything that just gives LIFE to the buildings. Take a look at the base of our new Town Center in the screenshots below. On the left is Amanda's original blockout, and on the right is her adding tons of gak to it! See the difference? [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44228604/46d06dd5f10958fd068ed46c1e520b55385017e9.png[/img] We want players to feel like these are intricate, yet cobbled together pieces of technology. You look at something and can't exactly tell how it works, but all those pieces make it feel somehow just complicated enough that you believe it. "Mechanical Magic" is another term we keep coming back to. Of course with this extra detail comes potentially lots of performance issues. So Amanda has to be judicious in her use of verts. But Fred is also deep in optimization land, making improvements to other areas of our GPU code so we can support many more details. And I have to make sure none of my own tech art is too expensive on the GPU too 😉 It's really a team effort to get this look that we want, but it's led by Amanda's vision for the buildings in the sky. Hope that gives you some insight into what we're making! Let me know if you dig what we're doing here, or anything else you might want to know about, in the comments below. We'll share more in next week's devlog. Thanks for the support ❤️