Overall, what kind of look and feel will the game environment you're creating have? To what extent are you using futuristic interpretations of actual locations? How faithful are they to their real counterparts of today?

Tim Cox: The combat-based sci-fi action games, as I see them, tend to have a grungy and gritty plate-metal photo-real industrial aesthetic. (Laughs - penalty for over-use of needlessly hyphenated words?) Black9 boasts a cleaner, more stylized feel, though some of that industrial stuff is still present.

The game world breaks down to three basic locales, the moon, Mars and Earth. Earth breaks down further into three sub-areas, Shanghai and Macao, China, and Seoul, Korea. We're visualizing a not so distant future that I hope people will relate to easily. There will still be shopping malls, gift shops, cafes and restaurants. Color and lighting will play a key role in establishing the uniqueness and feel of each area of the game. I'm excited about the contrast between the old and traditional style architecture of Shanghai against the more high-tech and futuristic areas of the Genesis HQ and the Mars colony.