Acquiescence
12 May 2026 - ken
It’s May already. The training arena’s been progressing nicely. Still some bugs to sort out, but I’m really pleased with how versatile it’s shaping up to be. With more polish, it may prove be useful for a future combat demo.
With headway made on programming, I took some time to peer back into the art side of the project. For the longest, I bounced back and forth over whether or not to commit to a fully retro PS1 low-poly look or take the plunge into something with a higher poly count. Both paths had their own pros and cons, but ultimately, I chose what would be most visually appealing and authentic to me.
The game will have several non-player characters in addition to enemies, so the sooner I solidify a pipeline for art assets the better. There’s a wealth of concept art I’ve been itching to get realized and into the game. Below you’ll see concept art done by @kiri_n_ for one of the more experienced members of the rescue team. Give them a follow!
Gunmetal Ghost’s world is one that’s been bloodied and weathered through years of paranormal terror, but unbowed. I’ve known since early on that I wanted character designs to aim for a semi-realistic, backed by bold character designs that placed emphasis on worn materials and restrained expressiveness. I want the characters to feel like products of a hostile, decaying world, so I’ve been getting as much practice as I can to deliver that experience.
Through a ton of research (and time reverse engineering…) into older PS2 era titles’ rendering techniques, I’ve gotten to learn quite a bit about post-processing as a whole, including cel shading and other light types, incredulous amounts of bloom, and gouraud vs. phong shading. A goal of this project is to achieve the lower fidelity grit you’d find in older animation during the early to mid-2000s. I’m excited to share how it comes out. Hopefully, without needing to setup and maintain a custom UE version, but what needs to get done is what will happen.