Godhood: Nature and Building Assets

,

During my internship at Abbey Games I mainly worked on their upcoming game Godhood. In this game, players create their own religion through commanding the people’s virtues and vices. The people are inspired to construct temples, and prepare disciples to convert unbelievers in special battle rituals. The gameplay is similar to sports management games, with automatic battles and training disciples for those battles.

The game was not yet in production, so my work mainly consisted of creating sketches and idea iteration, as well as creating test assets. A lot of the work shown on this page has been changed since and is not present in the final game.

Temples and Shrines

I was asked to design various buildings in the game, such as the temples used as training grounds for the disciples. The gameplay changed a lot around these training facilities; in the beginning each stat had it’s own temple design, whereas later players could choose which stat they wanted to dedicate a temple to.

monument sketches
Sketches for various statues and monuments.
temple complex sketch
A temple complex with different extensions, each acting as an upgrade to the shrine, improving it’s ability to train disciples in the game.
temple extensions sketches
Early in the design progress, we mixed and matched the extensions to see what looks best.

As a test, we decided to take one of our shrine designs to a final level of polish to get familiar with the asset production pipeline. Creating a final asset in Abbey’s game engine involved creating multiple images per asset: each object has a diffuse, normal and hight map layer which gives the 2D assets a distinctive 3D feel.

leopard shrine design process
First iteration of the Shrine of the Leopard. The shrine was designed as such that players could choose between different animals to dedicate the shrine to.
  • shrine morning
    Morning
  • shrine daylight
    Afternoon
  • shrine nighttime
    Night

Residential Buildings

early game building sketches
Sketches for early game buildings. The idea was to start with wooden structures which could be upgraded to stone buildings later in the game, but this proved to be too costly.

Disciples and villagers need a place to sleep, too. So we designed houses for them, which they would build themselves instead of the player. We also came up with the idea that villagers would build places of entertainment according to the virtues of your religion. In a religion of love, for example, brothels might appear between the villager houses.

residential building designs
Sketches of residential buildings.
residential house asset
Finished residential house assets.
villager building designs
Sketches of villager buildings; marketplaces, spas and taverns.


Nature Assets

godhood nature asset designs
An overview of the asset designs and finished assets I made.

At the end of my internship I worked on a new pass of nature assets. We researched tropical rainforest vegetation as well as how to create good-looking normal maps for round, organic shapes.

  • shrine nature morning
    Morning
  • shrine nature daytime
    Daytime
  • shrine nature evening
    Evening
  • shrine nature night
    Night

Note that not all assets in these screenshots are made by me, only the ones in the first image. Apart from actual vegetation assets, we also experimented with the texture of the ground plane.

  • sandy ground texture
  • forest ground texture
  • muddy ground texture
  • bluish ground texture
  • grass ground texture

More information about the game Godhood can be found on Steam. The game was announced to enter Early Acces in July 2019 and is fully released as of 11 August 2020.