My name is Sixten. I’m one of the artists working on Ground Zero. I want to talk about the art in the first chapters in the game, which is set largely on Taejongdae Beach and in Gamcheon Village.
The game takes place in South Korea and we try to keep true to the real world places we base our locations on. With that being said we sometimes have to take creative liberty and change some things in order for the game to play better. When we decide on a real world location we begin the process by gathering as many references as possible from that location and try to identify what characteristics that place might have. A good example is Gamcheon village which has really colorful houses and specific landmarks that are present in the real world location and in the game.
We usually build our levels to match the real world location as much as possible, before adding the horror elements on top.
The challenge is always to keep a balance between realism (recreating elements from the real world locations) and creative freedom. Sometimes we have to change things around in order to ensure smooth gameplay and clear visual identity and finding that balance can sometimes be a challenge.
The first chapters of the game are all set in the Gamcheon area. And we do a lot of work with lighting in order to tie them together with a cohesive color palette.
My personal favorite area in the first chapters of the game is Gamcheon village. It is one of the first areas we worked on as a team and I feel immense pride seeing it all together as someone who worked on the project way back when the game was just an empty world. We’ve put in a lot of effort into making the village represent the real world location by making a lot of assets of objects that can be found in real world locations such as the arch and the fish mural.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2340130/Ground_Zero/
What aspects of Ground Zero would you like to know more about in future developer diaries? Let us know in the comments 💬
