We’ve spent a lot of time and effort working on the environment art for the various areas within the world of Reina & Jericho. Although some of the areas were in decent enough shape for the simplified aesthetic we wanted to create, there were others that were barely more than white-box layouts of the game world, and they need work quite badly.

Reina & Jericho has 3d art but is still a side-scrolling game, so we wanted to keep the middle-plane of the environment relatively clean so Reina, the enemies she is fighting, and the platforming obstacles she interacts with would all read clearly. That said we still wanted to make the world simply look and feel better, and we wanted to help differentiate different areas from one another.

Check out this screenshot near the beginning of the Machine Shop biome:

Reina has been given a strong rim-light to help her pop against the background (and a small flash as her dash ability recharges as well). We have used fog, a mix of baked and real-time lighting, and color grading to help make this area chromatically distinct from others, and we have placed some pipe elements in the foreground and opened up the elements in the background (previously a flat wall) to create a bit more variety at the various planes of depth.

With that in mind as reference, let’s look at some before and after screenshots.


This is probably the most extreme example of a simple room that was placed in the game world. The room is barely more than a slope leading to a door given how plain the decorations are. This isn’t necessarily a huge problem – if a room only exists for you to fight a group of enemies and move on then there is no need to distract the player – major decorative landmarks in such a room might actually make things harder for the player, because we typically try to place those in places where we want the player to remember a location quite clearly (such as an important intersection).

All that said, more can be done.

Yes, this is technically a different room, but it shows the changes that can be made nicely. We’ve opened up the back wall to make the environment feel larger, we’ve added minor foreground elements to add some visual variety and also help the main plane the gameplay takes place on more distinct, we’ve used fog and lighting to create a sense of scale and depth, and overall, there is simply more visual variety. The player is still able to parse this area as a “blue, sci-fi area” in their memory. If the player ever left (maybe they travelled to a golden-colored area) and later returned to an area that was blue and sci fi looking, they would be able to tell that they were backtracking or revisiting familiar territory.

We try to balance having visual details to improve the appeal of the environment with keeping the shapes simple and easy to read, and not adding too much visual noise to distract from the central plane the action of the game takes place on. I think we’ve got a good balance here. It’s just enough to look interesting as you dash through this platforming room, but you can still read the environment as it whips by.


We have a cave biome (there are a few in this game). Where there should be organic patterns we have hard corners, and aside from different textures being placed and a different level of fog and post-processing this area is not all that distinct from the “before” image from the Laboratory. What can be done to help it without breaking the budget?

Quite a bit! Next door we have a room with a similar layout that’s already been decorated that gives us a nice point of comparison. This area is near the surface, so we have cracks of light, and root systems that now give some flavor to the chosen color palette. Use of large, medium, and small rocks helps communicate a more organic type of environment rather than the regular hard angles of man-made construction. On the gameplay-plane where Reina is running around the player can still see a clear solid edge so there is no doubt where the platform begins, but it is a bit more blended into the environment. Some baked lighting and visual effects help aim the players eyes in the right direction, although it Is still a little dark overall.

This area is supposed to be quite close to the surface, and that platform Reina is running on still seems a bit flat and artificial. Could we make it seem that some light from outside is creeping in a bit and somehow blend in something that could help tie the artificially flat surface into the aesthetic a bit more?

Perfect. A little framing to make it seem like these shapes are being created deliberately by whoever dug out this cave (and placed the door on the right), the lines they create reinforce the plane of action and the direction the player can move, there’s a little bit more light, and we still have a nice claustrophobic cave that is visually distinct from the many other subterranean areas of the game.



With roughly 400 rooms in the game, and many of them being large, outdoor areas that stretch the definition of “room” to the breaking point, there is a lot of environmental decoration to be done. We don’t have a huge team or a huge budget, but we are doing tiny things to add personality, aid the player’s efforts to navigate the game world, and meaningfully improve the overall aesthetic of the game. I hope you like some of what you’ve seen!

It takes time to load a video game. Whether it happens all at once in one big loading event that gets it all done up front or it is broken up into smaller pieces and loaded in smaller chunks (or even streamed in while the game is running), the game data needs to end up in memory somehow. On top of this, players don't all have the same preference of one solution compared to another.

Our original strategy was to load the entire game world in one shot so the game would have no loading screens at any other point. Unfortunately some players didn’t like the idea of having to wait for 30-45 seconds right at the start, especially if they didn’t know in advance that they wouldn’t be exposed to any more loading delays until they closed the game. So… it was time to rewrite some code to allow the game to be loaded in smaller chunks. Unfortunately this changed one of the core assumptions about how the game was architected: not everything in the game was available.

In our original paradigm where the entire game world was loaded, if we needed to move an NPC for a cutscene we would know with 100% certainty that they were out there somewhere, they could be located, and they could be moved. With the game data loading in chunks, there is a decent chance that what you are looking for might not have been loaded yet. The conversation with the computer now goes something like this:

Cutscene Engine: “Go get that NPC and move them to this room for a cutscene.”
Game World: “That NPC doesn’t exist. The part of the game they are in hasn’t been loaded yet.”
Cutscene Engine: “Well go find them.”
Game World: “I don’t know where to look. The part of the game they are in hasn’t been loaded yet.”

It makes a good point, therefore we need a way to tell the game where things are supposed to be before they are loaded. And when an object gets loaded it also needs to ask if there is some save data that needs to be applied, because we can’t assume that it existed when all of that game data was being applied (as a matter of fact, it probably didn’t). And an object needs to save and track its own default state just in case it gets loaded one way but then has to get reset to a different state that isn’t explicitly marked in the save data. And… and there are just a lot of things that need to be considered. Especially in a game with save data as complicated as Reina & Jericho, because every time you find a new save point a new timeline is saved in whatever state it is in at that specific moment, so there are dozens of timelines recording dozens of potential world states.

And that has been an interesting and fairly complicated problem.

In the next updates we'll focus on something a bit less technical, and we’ll have some nice visual before and after comparisons soon, but for the past week or two the story has been the pains of loading data asynchronously in a game about asynchronous timelines.