In the recent issue 09-10/2017 of the german 'Making Gams' magazine, which is focused towards game developers, there is a very interesting, 28-pages long Making of Elex special. In 6 articles, which are written by different Piranha Bytes developers, several aspects of the development are dicussed in detail: The whole project, leveldesign, engine, cutscenes, music and console ports.
The extensive special in the 'Making Games' magazine also contains a lot of new imagery, screenshots and artworks as well as pictures from behind the scenes and of Piranha Bytes' development tools. The magazine is available for order starting on 18 August, or digitally from now on. You can find more information by clicking on "Read more"!
In the first article, Björn Pankratz, lead game designer and project manager, talks about the ambitious project Elex. How did the setting and the world came to be? Which thoughts put the developer into guilds and story? And which difficulties did they face considering monsters, the balancing and the pacing?
What follows is an article from lead environment artist Victor Karp, who explains how the team made the creation of textures easier for themselves, by automatic UV mapping for example. Also a new vegeation system is being used in Elex, which can place grass, flowers and small rocks automatically according to certain rules and algorithms. New as well are improved tools for streets, which now can wind themselves through the landscape, and for rivers which can now flow around objects and converge realistically.
In the third part of the Making of, senior software engineer Kurt Pelzer and lead programmer Philipp Krause explain the history of Piranha Bytes' own Genome engine and present the improvements made with each new game - including Elex. Accordingly, the engine wasn't just switched over to DirectX 11, the world streaming also was completely rewritten, the navigation system was enhanced and the renderer was switched over to a tile-based deferred renderer relatively late in the development process.
Then, cutscene artist Claudia Kien talks about the cutscenes in Elex and the film "Offline - Are you ready for the next level", which Piranha Bytes helped to create. The extensive process of the creation of the ingame cutscenes is explained, as well as the many thoughts that must be put into them before the cutscenes are done. Some of these steps are the creation of a story board, the blocking and the motion capture recordings.
What follows is a second article by Björn Pankratz, this time about the music in Elex, since he isn't just project manager, lead game designer and story writer, but also composer. He has written the extensive game soundtrack in his spare time, and in the article he explains the creation process of his work. For Elex, many music pieces have been written specially for certain points in the game or characters for the first time in a Piranha Bytes game, which makes the soundtrack more than three time as long compared to earlier PB games. Besides the music, in his spare time Björn also writes a book about his 11 years as a bouncer.
And in the last article, Maki Dieffenbach, programmer at Piranha Bytes, talks about the difficulties of porting the game to consoles, besides the fundamental technical requirements. Special attention must be paid towards the user interface and the user management, the save system and the feature to start playing on consoles before the game is completely installed.
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