Concept art and a stop-motion octopus

There's been a lot going on behind the scenes over the last few weeks. A while ago I commissioned Ana Steiner (who drew the Sidequest Ninjas) to design all the devices that you'll put into factories in Hexahedra, and the first batch has arrived! Different factories will use different sets of devices — the devices will do the same things across factories, but some will have well-engineered, high-tech versions, and some factories will be running on devices cobbled together from scrap.

This first set is for a middle-of-the-road factory, with solidly built devices designed by someone who just wanted to get the job done without frittering away money on making them look attractive. Of course, as the artist, Ana has done a great job of making these "merely functional" devices pleasing to look at.

The first set of devices (click for larger version)

Some of the devices will see much heavier use that others — every factory will need a Shipper to send cubes off to customers, for example. Here are more detailed drawings of some of the most important devices — you can click on any of them to see a larger version:

The Sourcer, which adds new cubes to the factory

The Spray Painter, for recolouring cube panels

My favourite, the Laser, which allows logic branching based on cube face colour

The Shipper, which sends cubes off to customers

Now that the first set is in, I've contracted a 3D modeller, Antony Ward, to build the in-game assets from the concepts for this first set, so the Unity client will soon have some proper models in it.

But I've also been putting the concept art to work in other ways. Since the Unity client isn't much to look at yet, but I wanted something quick and simple to point to to show what Hexahedra is about, I used the concept art to make a little stop-motion video about the game. It heavily features Octavius, a little octopus my wife crocheted a while ago:

I'm looking forward to the point when I can recreate something like this video using the final assets in Unity, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy Octavius running his little cardboard factory.