For the past year we’ve been working on a new project with a small team at Unknown Worlds. While most of the company has been involved with the underwater adventure Subnautica, Andrew, Brian, Dushan and I have been quietly working on a different type of game. Future Perfect: a game about discovering, creating and playing games online with your friends.

Many games have influenced us, but some of our fondest gaming memories come from playing mods at LAN parties. Future Perfect is about bringing that nostalgic experience into the present.  The first part of Future Perfect is a handful of varied game modes based around first person cooperative and competitive gameplay. The second part is an toolset built directly into Future Perfect for creating and sharing your own games.…

In developing an overall visual style for Future Perfect, we encountered a few problems that we hadn’t come across in previous games. Chief among these is that it’s difficult to define a consistent visual style for a project that’s so heavily defined by variety and user-generated content. The fact that the “game” is really a collection of games, tools and other components means that there’s no obvious theme or backstory to develop a style out of.

That Retro Vibe

In the end we decided that, because we would be shipping our own game modes alongside the tools for making them, it was still important to have a strong visual style and to use it to define the visuals of the entire project.…