What is visual look development?

Visual look development is the process of nailing down the visual look of a game and how it can be realized in the game engine. The goal is to answer the question: What is your game going to look like and how are you going to do it? By the end, you should have an in-game demo showing your environment at near shippable quality.

Keep the area small. If there are multiple environments, develop one at a time. Choose the most important environments first.

This article describes the process using a case study: Star Trek Online.

Star Trek Online takes place on board ships, in space and on the ground. Each of these environments will be different and will require a separate look development. For our first visual look development cycle, we chose the interior of starships. By the end of the cycle, we wanted to show the interior of a galaxy class starship in-game at near shippable quality.

To manage the workload, we kept the number of rooms low. We chose a hallway and a conference room from the Next Generation series.