Behind the Scenes: Scenery

As promised for the Tier 2 and above patrons, I wanted to provide a little “behind the scenes” insight on the creation process for Now & Then. 

First up? Building scenery. As I’m of the opinion that locations are as important as characters are to a game, I spent a lot of time researching a solution for this issue.

Because so much of the first act needed to be played out inside the Brooks’ apartment, I really needed sets that could be employed for a variety of unique scenes without too much in the way of repetition. While the mod community has made a lot of great maps, I found that none of them really fit my needs. Either the available rooms didn’t have the correct proportions or didn’t allow for the rearrangement of furniture or had some noticeably low-res textures. 

Some early examples that I used as basis for the final set:

With that in mind, I started building the combo living room and kitchen by myself with a variety of wall and furniture mods available. Initially, I built both as separate scenes, so as not to make arranging the dozens of props overly difficult. 

None of this would not possible without the work from modders such as Hooh and Lykanz, to name a few. In fact, Lykanz’s wall objects have been indispensable for creating custom rooms for this game. 

The living room was based loosely on the set from 808s (above right). I made sure to tighten the scale to make it feel more cramped. One of the issues I’ve always had with some of the premade sets used in other games is that their sense of scale tends to be off. 

The kitchen is largely constructed from Hooh’s scenery mods. I dropped in a metal rack filled with boxes at the end purely as something Jack would do for temporary storage as he’d been stockpiling for some time before the game’s start.

After getting the two sets locked down, I went to the task of merging them and arranging both the lighting and camera presets. As you can see from the above shot, one of the more important light sources is placed behind the curtains to approximate sunlight from outside. 

One of the bonuses to building these sets is that it allowed me to arrange camera angles with two locations paired. Doing this meant I could take shots through open doorways into other areas. As example from Chapter Two:

The apartment’s main hallway is basically stitched to almost all of the other rooms just for this purpose. The exterior map? I crammed a small slice of the living room against the glass doors to fake the appearance that they’re connected.

- Kinderfeld