Servo - World Buildings

The world of Servo is very war torn and ravaged by battle. Skyscrapers will have burned out holes from artillery blasts and the roads will be pock marked with missile craters. Part of the fun of having giant mechs in a world like this is the idea of smashing apart this environment even more. The buildings, which are my current task and the subject of this post, are a going to carry most of that burden.

Early concept showing Servos and enemies amongst buildings

The current idea is to have two types of buildings, those that are tall and can be used as pathing obstructions/blockers and smaller buildings that the Servos can freely roam through and destroy. In order to make them feel a little more sci-fi and futuristic they’ll be built off of a hex shape. They’ll also need to not compete with the Servo’s themselves or the RTS buildings and units, since those are the stars of the show, so the buildings shouldn’t be too cool or individually unique looking.

Early building mockup

The biggest challenge when working on these so far is dealing with the two states that they’ll have, the starting state they’re in when the game starts, and then the destroyed state as they take damage from Servo combat or just being crushed by the movement of the Servos. The taller buildings that provide obstruction will be destroyed but leave behind an inner frame that will continue to obstruct, while the smaller buildings will just get destroyed completely. Figuring out a scale for them will be the next challenge. Our Servos are around 100ft tall and even a decent sized skyscraper starts to dwarf that, which wont work well with our camera, so we’ll have to figure something out that works well without making the scale feel completely off.

Early in the project I did some tests with flat shaded and simple geometry to see what would feel OK for the game scale, hopefully we can replicate the feel of those tests but with actual game buildings that destroy and other things like cars and people to help sell the overall scale despite the buildings cheating it a bit.

Early scale test

Currently I’m wrapping up our first test case building that will be destructible, and with the proper FX and physics it should look pretty cool.