My approach to environment development on COH2
Here is a breakdown of how the environments for COH2 were created.
I started this process with these goals:
I started this process with these goals:
- To make environments a more active part of the gameplay
- To improve the visual quality of the art.
- To provide a living world experience, through seasonal elements.
The original COH had 1 season. The textures were generally pretty flat and there was not much distinction between material types.
From here I worked with the concept artists to provide some visuals for how we wanted the environments to feel.
With the concepts, I worked with the artists to develop a visual target for our spring environment that included all of the featured improvements that we wanted to achieve. - Better normal maps, distinct material types, more realistic surfaces, and better water.
From the visual target the art team worked with programming and were able to achieve most of the improvement we were after.
The same approach was done with the winter, but with the addition of some new tech to sell the winter environment. Permanent track in the snow with displacement, breakable ice surfaces, seasonal texture swaps, object snow shaders. This is the visual target of those efforts.
Ingame results. This was the first map where we assembled all the winter tech that we developed. The results were impressive and provided a unmatched snow tech to our game.. Playing the same map in different seasons was a real compelling use of the tech and provided different gaming experiences on the same map, depending on which season was chosen.
This is the final results with gameplay.
We eventually got all four seasons in, but the method for those was much the same.