Hi everyone,

While the rest of the world is leaving behind the colder days, we are moving into my favourite season: Spring! What better way to mark the seasonal shift than a brand new Store page!

DROS is a 3rd-person action adventure game being developed by Aussie studio emergeWorlds.
If this is your first peek of our new game-in-production DROS, then welcome! Glad you stopped by :)

We've been hard at work on a dinky little demo over the past year and are finally starting to spread the word. It's still early days yet but seeds have been planted, soil has been tilled and we're seeing lots of cool little Drossy sprouts pop up everywhere. In other words, things are going great and we're keen to share what we've been creating.

In DROS, we were keen to explore the relationship of two becoming one...a kind of awkward symbiotic character study :) What does it mean to rely on another? To be together and then to be apart?
Far from taking ourselves too seriously though...DROS was a way we could play with this idea and
have some fun with it. Our two protagonists, the burly Captain and the nimble Little Dros find themselves both out of luck...literally at deaths door. The only way either can survive is with the other.
But don't for a second think it's a match made in heaven...

DROS are slimy alchemical creatures who need to jump into a shell to survive. Little DROS is our plucky little symbiote and Captain is her disgruntled host. To solve puzzles and defeat enemies players will be able to attach and detach Little DROS from her host. For combat and anything requiring a ‘direct' approach players will need to use the Captain. For nimble platforming, travelling down pipes and squirming into small spaces they can detach and use Little Dros.

With a bunch of playable demo stages under our belt we're moving now into full production. It's time to put into practice the lessons we've learned and the systems we've setup. Our initial vertical slice goal was to demonstrate not only the mechanics of the game but the atmosphere of the world and the stories of the characters within. I'm happy to report that we've achieved just that! We're lucky to have a group of very talented devs crafting this world and designing it's gameplay and it's exciting to see the game take shape as weeks go by. I look forward to our next update when we'll share new milestone features and more news!

In the meantime, enjoy some gifs from our vertical slice demo and if you like what you see don't forget to wishlist DROS and pay us a visit on the DROS official Discord.
Now for a coffee!
-Ben

We have finished texture on The Captain. We love the way he turned out. Also experimenting with early level design and art.

Okay it’s time we shared some of our DROS charaters. We have started animating Little Dros, DROS enemies, The Captain and all sorts of other DROS. There is so much DROS happening it’s hard to keep up.

This is a tile-set made up of 9 different pieces and is for the ground areas in the DROS Prelude. We are really happy with how the grass has turned out and how the hand painted style is coming through in all the elements in the level.

We love rocks but we don’t want to spend all day designing different rocks. So we came up with a very quick way to generate a variety of rocks for Dros. You rock!

Coming up with an overall game aesthetic is challenging.

We didn’t want the elements and props in DROS to look the same as the traditional dungeon crawler genre. That’s why we added a more unique steampunk aesthetic to props like pressure plates, levers, and ladders. Each prop in DROS went through a number of iterations before we could settle on a look.

We went into Substance Designer and textured the props with rust, chrome and scratches to bring out the steampunk look we are headed towards.

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In the world of DROS, each stage would be a discrete architectural island floating in space. The player could then explore the stage, discover its secrets and solve puzzles by spinning it and scrutinising it from every angle, vertically and horizontally. In a Virtual Reality space the same could be achieved by literally walking around the stage and peering into it.

Games such as Monument Valley and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker have explored ideas like this to great effect. I was keen to see where we could take this idea in our own game world.

Earliest inspiration came from architecture and sculpture. In particular the Brutalist concrete sculptures of David Uemoto served as a good jumping off point. Having studied architecture, I had always loved the surreal illustrations of Lebbeus Woods, showing strange, yet somehow familiar pieces of architecture suspended in mid-air.

A crowd favourite amongst game designers, M.C. Escher’s work is always fun to have on one’s screen when designing environments such as this. Games such as the Monument Valley series have drawn heavily from his work and DROS stage designs also took inspiration from prints such Waterfall.

Having been a long-time Manga fan , I also looked to the pages of Tsutomu Nihei’s amazing series ‘Blame’. In Blame, the protagonists wander through a monolith Dyson-spere-like space inside of which the remnants of the human race live in squalor. This was a great inspiration when trying to imagine our Tower as a huge void-like space inside of which the various stages of our game took place.

Conceptually, the tower comprises of  7 areas, rising one above the other. Each would be mapped to the 7 levels of alchemy and would take reference visually from this process. Lower levels would start deep and dirty and dark and gradually rise up to the higher areas of the tower. The tower itself drew inspiration from a number of sources. The art of Stanislav Szukalski, Peter Gric and the Tower of Babel. Basically, it needed to be huge and monolithic.

One of the first stages to be designed was the ‘Catchment’ which would serve as the starting point of the game, at the base of the tower where sewers flowed. Firstly, mood and lighting concepts were painting to gauge the general direction.

The stage masses would reference back to the original idea of discrete floating chunks of architecture in a space. Styling would reference steampunk sources as well as dark fantasy films such as Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. The goal was to shoot for a look that was dark and moody yet still retained a whimsy and charm in its simplicity and styling. Like if Tim Burton directed a mario game!

Following from this, a more game-ready concept was created. To satisfy a limited scope, the stages would need to be constructed using a modular approach. This would involve a base geometry pass using ProBuilder supplemented by props made in Blender. Textures would use the PBR pipeline.

Stay tuned for the next blog update where we start translating some of the above into early 3D mockups in Unity.

DROS is a story-driven 3rd person action adventure game. It is inspired by dark fantasy films such as Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. Guide our heroes, The Captain and Little Dros as they form a reluctant alliance to overcome the Black Alchemist and his horde of corrupted Dros minions. 

Follow our progress here on the blog and our Twitter account for the latest news and development.