Meet Michael Bastiaens, 3D artist at Black Salt Games

Created by four people with a shared vision, Black Salt Games proves you don’t need a large team to make a big impact. Its most recent game, Dredge, made waves thanks to its mastery of atmospheric tension and eerie exploration. We had a chat with 3D artist Michael Bastiaens to learn all about Dredge’s development and mobile release.

Michael Bastiaens: I first got into game development working with the Age of Empires scenario editor tool. I’d make “wave-defense” and simple adventure games with it, and sink many hours into playing and creating them.

After high school I was on track to study architecture, but on the way to a university open day I saw a billboard advertising a course in 3D art and game development. When I got home, I flipped a coin and ended up signing up for that course!

I came onto the project a little bit after Black Salt Games was founded. Before that, I led the art department at my previous studio. The work we did there was always client-based, so being able to create our own game with Dredge and being a part of the creative process and decision-making was a big change.

When we first did some of our early art explorations and blockouts of the starting island, there was something really appealing about the dreariness and isolation of everything. Combining this with the idea of “Lovecraftian Fishing” as a tagline, it all just seemed to resonate with the team.

The original prototype excited a lot of our early playtesters – everyone just kept wanting to find out a little bit more about the story, or fish for a little longer. There was something about that initial “hook” that felt like we were onto something pretty interesting.

There are lots of real-world places with an atmosphere of isolation that we drew inspiration from. When it came to designing creatures and monsters, nature already has that reference covered – it’s already come up with things far scarier and creepier than we could have envisioned ourselves!

As we were creating Dredge, we would often draw on ideas and mechanics from the games we were all playing in our spare time. A few times we would use the term “What would Witcher do?” to figure out some of our problems.

Lots! I think the first few hurdles were around creating the water, and finding a solution that would not only be visually appealing but also mesh well with the gameplay. We initially used Gertsner waves, but they ended up turning into ramps that would launch the boat into the air. We also tried waves that would slowly make the boat drift off into the open ocean if left alone over time.

These issues require a bit of technical problem-solving to figure out and a lot of experimentation – which leads to more playtesting throughout the development cycle. We were able to catch a lot of strange edge cases and interactions early on, so in the end there was less chaos to untangle when everything came together.

Perhaps my favourite hurdle (and solution) was how we try keep people in the starting area, despite the game being open world. Playtesters would usually see the giant volcano at the start and want to explore it straight away in their slow boats. To discourage this, we created a set of giant islands that block line of sight to this location.

It didn’t stop every single player, but it did just enough to keep people from getting distracted. Usually we try to distract people, and catch “magpie” gamers out, with sparkles and points of interest fairly often in this game so watching people play the game was incredibly important to helping us strike this balance.