Towerborne: Mission System
As Lead Environment Artist at Stoic, I helped build out the art side of the procedural mission system for Towerborne alongside design and engineering. Each playable mission is composed of several layers and randomized modular pieces to create the full scene.
The key pillars of this system were to maximize flexibility, and to easily add a variety of scenes, while solving to reduce repetition of both visuals and gameplay spaces.
Assets and set dressing pictured are made by a huge array of people at Stoic and Airborn:
Myself, Eric Dagley, Pavel Elagin, Sadie Johnson, Jimmy Malachier, Tai Walker, Kjeld Pedersen, Pedro Damasceno, Dominik Gröstlinger, Ilka Hesche, Jeremy Boulivet, Jonas Kunert, Valeria Traverso, and Kaat Van Thillo.
A major benefit of this setup is the ability to swap the midground and skybox layers to create a variety of lighting and vista options, while keeping the mission layout and biome selection consistent.
Using those layers, I prototyped some time of day experiments to prove out the easy swaps we could do without new feature support. We didn't end up revisiting this idea until much later on, but it successfully showed the range we could get early on.
The design department needed the playable spaces of each mission to be randomized from a selection of small pieces called stages. We made sure to supply every biome with many variations of stages in order to support that goal of randomization.
Themed stages like this healing stage were also added into the stage mix later. All healing stages had a matching theme, prop placement, and collision, but changed the surroundings to match the biome it was apart of.
A single stage can be repeated any number of times within a mission, even next to itself. We utilized blueprint randomizers to vary the set dressing and reduce repetition.
A great example of how powerful we could go with this randomization setup on one shared stage theme. Art by Jonas Kunert at Airborn.