faced. But we put a lot of thought into these issues very early in the development process. I think we solved all of these problems in DW2. I’m sure we’ll continue to improve the UI as time goes on.
You can also add animation. So we have animated star
coronas, animated planetary cloud formations, animated nebulae, swirling black hole accretion discs, etc.
THE FIRST GAME FEATURED A VERY POWERFUL UI THAT SUITED MANY DIFFERENT PLAYSTYLES. HOW DIFFICULT WAS IT TO EVOLVE THAT ASPECT OF THE USER EXPERIENCE? EG: The DW1 UI was powerful and functional, once you got used to it. But it was pretty clunky and had evolved over time, probably not in a good or cohesive way. It had a lot of full screens that separated the player from the map. In some cases, it required drilling down through various screens to find some information that players frequently needed to know. It was also not very scalable at all, so high resolution screens were a big problem. In DW2 we needed to provide all of the functionality of the DW1 UI, but it had to be fully scalable, more consistent and presentable, more intuitive with lots of tooltips, and more integrated with the map to give better situational awareness when making decisions. And continue to allow players focused on a given playstyle to have easy access to all the information they need, ideally no more than one level down.
So these were the challenges we 54 | MCV/DEVELOP April 2022
WHAT TOOLS AND PROCESSES WERE USED IN THE VISUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAME? EG: Distant Worlds 2 uses the open-source engine Stride for its rendering. We use Stride Game Studio for importing art content for ship models, textures, etc. The modellers use various 3D tools for making their content. We made sure that even the free 3D modelling tools would be sufficient for creating models for DW2. We use Spine for character animation. And we have a number of internal tools for pre-
processing ship models and all their related data. These tools and related processes should be helpful for modders. Our art, story and data teams have basically been ‘modders’ of the core game content.
CAN YOU REVEAL ANY NUMBERS ON THE SCALE OF THE PROJECT? EG: We had a much larger team altogether than in DW1 and you can see this in the game credits. Of course most were not working on the project full-time. But for example the art and user interface team has a total of around 10 people.
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