Neon Giant Talked about Building the World of The Ascent

Neon Giant Creative Director Tor Frick has talked about building the world of The Ascent – a cyberpunk action-shooter RPG – as well as the tools the studio created to make the world we know now. 

The Neon Giant is a small studio, which had to face many challenges during development. The team needed to find a fast content pipeline to cover the game world with a lot of objects. At the same time, that pipeline had to support the game's art style. Meanwhile, assembling the large world itself was not an easy task.

The team focused on removing distractions and creating limitations to concentrate on the big picture and leave room for polishing. Neon Giant made simple tools for automating the processes they could and limited the colors for the game's assets to three, which helped with the visual polish and the design of the game.

The automated and simplified pipeline produced additional benefits, like lower texture usage, reusable materials, iteratable models, and no technical surprises.

The team made their own pipe generation tool, which we covered last year, cable and signs tools, a room maker, and destruction animations, which Tor Frick describes in detail in the video.

To learn more about The Ascent's world, watch the full presentation. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.