In the my last news update I announced my wife and I were taking a trip to Scandinavia at the end of May. Now we're back.

In the first half of the trip we were in Malmö, Sweden for the Nordic Games conference. This was the first time I've gone to a game developer conference and didn't have a concrete agenda: my main reasons for selecting this one specifically were: a) it happened to fall at a time where I felt like I could take a break, b) Copenhagen (a 20 minute train ride from Malmö) is a direct flight from Boston, and c) I've never been to Scandinavia.

I had a lot of fun, talked to a number of interesting developers, and saw a bunch of cool talks on different aspects of game development.

The two most interesting talks I saw were one by Fawzi Mesmar (designer at Ubisoft) and one by Marie Mejerwall (systems designer) on AI.

Mesmar's talk was on creativity, and I liked that he had a pretty clear thesis on what creativity was: a statistically unlikely idea that creates value in some context.

[dynamiclink href="https://youtu.be/7i6wuit8dXE?t=361"][/dynamiclink]

I appreciated that he's attempted to put out a fairly robust definition for something that is usually described in a very handwavy manner.

Mejerwall's was more technical on combat AI as Finite State Machines. This one was interesting to me because I've been thinking about how I might rework NPC AI's to be more modular. She didn't talk specifically about modularity, but a few of the things she did say sparked some ideas for me:

[dynamiclink href="https://youtu.be/N2cVhqpz71c?t=170"][/dynamiclink]

The second half of the trip was spent in the Faroe Islands, which provided a nice slower-paced cooldown from the intense social activity of the conference. Kristin has wanted to go to the Faroes for quite some time, and I thought they would be a great place to find some anomaly inspirations. I've talked before about the process of generating anomaly images, where I mostly have relied on kitbashing assets in 3D environment rendering software. I have several techniques that I've learned over time to produce images that are both visually appealing and spark some sense of alien mystery.

I took a lot of reference pictures while we were there: not so much to specifically recreate a location, but to have something to understand when/how a 2D image can communicate things like distance and scale. Most everyone has had the experience of taking a photo of something dramatic only to discover that the image is somehow much less impressive than what you saw. Reversing this process is a big part of anomaly visuals: taking basic models/shaders and using tricks of perspective, scale and lighting to make them look convincingly alien and impressive. So finding locations that look impressive in real life and then also translate well as images can help me figure out what types of terrain layouts will work well.

One of the most famous locations in the Faroe Islands is Traelanipa, a dramatic cliff where a lake seems implausibly posed above sea caves.

This is partly an optical illusion: While the lake is 100' above sea level, the cliff's edge is 250' above sea level, but slopes down quickly below the eyeline. The large scale, plus lack of reference objects of known size like trees or buildings tricks the eye into thinking the lake must be about to spill over the cliff's edge.

(The general lack of trees and large vegetation has some additional advantage for my purposes: for one, these environments naturally look more "alien". For another, lots of independent meshes are really computationally expensive to place and render. Terrain that looks good with just a shader applied is just overall an easier environment to create.)

A number of people have asked about my future plans now that Starcom: Unknown Space has reached the point where I am mostly just making minor bug fixes and QoL updates. (There was a minor patch this week as the games inches hopefully closer to Steam Deck "verified" status.)

One can infer from my activities on this trip that I am at least considering making another entry into the Starcom universe. I haven't 100% decided that's what I am going to do: building these games has been both enormously rewarding but also challenging and stressful. Right now, my current plan is to allow myself to relax a bit, but start thinking about what another Starcom game would look like if I were to make one.

I plan to put a survey up in the next week or two.

Until then, thanks for reading my "What I Did on Spring Break" report!

- Kevin