Okay, today we'll cover two things - some exciting news, and some post mortem thoughts on the making of the Void Harbinger bomb!

First the exciting sneak peek news:

Void Crew is officially coming to consoles - XBOX S / X and PlayStation 5 - and we’re bringing full cross-platform support with us. That’s right: soon you’ll be able to team up with your friends no matter where they play - and fail gloriously together!
Get ready to explore, fight, and survive together across PC and consoles later this year!

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Now that you know you'll be able to have explosive fun with your console buddies, I thought I'd share a few things on a feature we were unsure how people would react to. Yes.
The high-chance-of-self-destruction Void Harbinger 'Nuke'. Yes, that thing.

In addition to the below "making of", here's a video of the devs talking about the nuke (and other explosive stuff!)

With the development of the Payload Launcher, we needed stuff to fire: Payload items. Naturally the default selection was Medium Missiles and Heavy Torpedos, but we wanted to have some more specialized ones as well. This gave birth to the Cluster Missile to deal with swarms, and we knew we needed something in the other end of the spectrum - a "clear-the-level" kinda deal.

So let's just go wild!? What is the biggest warhead we can think of?

Well, a nuke isn't something new to video games, and there are some really well executed variants out there. But having a nuke in space does have the odd side effect of not being affected by things like gravity and heat rising upwards. So that made the iconic mushroom cloud hard to pull off (we did try a simple version... and as expected, didn't work).

Without relying on the shape itself, we had to break it further down. What makes a "big boom"?

First off, of course, we'd need a big ball of glowy death that kills more or less anything inside. Check. Done. Let's test gameplay. Okay, the odds of self-destruction using one of these babies is pretty high. Yes, we decided to keep the ability for it to damage the player ship (friendly fire is disabled normally). If you were going to fire off a Nuke, any sane person would know to GET TO A SAFE DISTANCE! That and we found it funny that the target you set would probably be chasing you while your Nuke was in transit... We've seen a few streamers panicking when they realize this! Oh, the joy *tear *.

So we nailed a giant spherical death bubble. But it didn't feel like a nuke. Yes we made it yellow to begin with, and people got the association, but it was just over too fast, it didn't have that satisfying punch to it.

So studying further the anatomy of big bombs, it became apparent we needed layers of events. Small bombs usually have complex and fast effects, while bombs this size would have slow moving bits to help give the illusion of scale.

We ended up doing several prototypes, and found that initial bubble, followed by a shockwave and debris some delay afterwards, and rounded off with a nice dissolve. We agreed the extended duration made it scratch that itch, but at this time it was still a pure white/yellow-ish bubble.

Then came the intense discussion. What if... we made it into something a bit aligned with our lore? What if instead of an atom bomb, we made a... Void bomb!? We changed the color of the sphere and now it didn't really feel like anything - it wasn't a nuke anymore, and the flatness was just not clear. We agreed to give it a try with some texture work, tying it with the visuals from the Void Tunnel and see if that would work. We spent some time tuning the emission to allow some details to surface in the center of the sphere and added some details... and voilà, this helped give it that little nudge towards being its own thing.

We also wanted to make sure whoever picked it up would understand that is was different. We opted for something that was a bit torpedo-is to keep the visual language, and added icons to help show it was different. But it wasn't enough, we felt. So now that we had settled on the Void-tech concept, we thought it would be fun to make it feel like a hot potato and give damage to whoever carried it! (Personally, I wanted everyone in vicinity to take damage, buuuut in retrospective I'm glad someone convinced me otherwise...)

(^ I just really like this gif... STILL... it's 'mind blowing'...)
Nothing's really done unless it has sound. For the audio, it is conceptually mixed - true, in space it wouldn't make any sound at all, but that would be very 'meh', and we here for good fun, after all.

So assuming it is audible, it would make sense theoretically if the sound was first audible only when the shockwave reaches the player, but in order to give player the gameplay feedback that it exploded, the initial part of the sound plays at the exact same moment when the explosion starts.

The sound starts with a deep, boomy explosion, consisting of many layers coming from various recordings of bombs, fuel igniting and synthetic elements.

Then, when visually the player is blasted with all the space debris and dust coming with the shockwave, the sound transitions into a chaotic rumble - things whipping past, and reality distorted around us. The idea we wanted to portray here was hearing the wrath of the Void being unleashed with that bomb.

With the magic of sound and application of well timed camera shakes, it became what it is today - something that has delighted players who have been favored by METEM and come across one of these beautifully dangerous things.

There is no video or gif that can replace how it feels ingame, so if you haven't already tried it - now's the time!

Remember to join our Discord[discord.com] for more co-op and chaos!

Until the next rambling...

// Daniel, Creative Director, Hutlihut Games