Rick Dimond's portfolio

Dust 514

CCP, Shanghai
Position: Art director

Dust was a classic troubled project - lots of good ideas and some really talented people... but an inconsistant vision, some overly optimistic goals, and too few people who actually knew how to get things done. Add in a looming deadline, and suddenly people were looking for someone like me to put out the fires.

One of the core problems for Dust was that as a spin-off of EVE Online, they knew they had four races, and what their spaceships looked like... but had no idea how that translated into things in their game.

They had focused on trying to make everything "cool," rather than having clear, structural styles that drove the look of the different races.

Obviously, I had to change that.

Characters:

All characters in Dust are mass-produced clones. The player's conciousness is transfered into his current body, but it is disposable - the flesh is no more important than the armor that wraps it, or the weapons it carries.

The Amarr are imperialistic, arrogant, religious, and rich.

Their armor and gear had to feel ornate and ritualistic.

We used as reference the fancy military uniforms of the Napoleonic era, adding in elements like gilding and religious inscriptions.

The Gallente are high-tech, flamboyant attention-seekers, meddling in everyone's affairs.

For them, dying is okay - but dying unoticed is not.

For them, we referenced things like NASCAR - everything is custom, with bright colors and logos.

The Minmatar are the gypsy tinkers of the EVE universe - poor and struggling to find a home.

To match that, we made their tech look rough and customizable, with obvious structural reinforcement and lots of exposed mechanics.

However, we did not make their gear old and rusty - no one wants to buy gear that looks like that!

The Caldari are faceless corporate thugs - cold and efficient.

Their gear is plain and angular, with little decoration or personality.

Vehicles:

Just like the weapons and armor, vehicles needed to follow the design rules for each race. However, vehicles proved difficult to impliment and balance, so we did not create that many for the initial launch.

Like their armor, Gallente vehicles were colorful, shiny and high-tech.

We used complex curves and fitted components to convey that these were specialized - no swapping parts or jury-rigging!

Weapons:

We built far more weapons than characters or vehicles, but previously they were the thing that was least racially identifiable.

Luckily, we needed to upgrade them anyway - the new versions were designed from the ground up to reflect our visual design rules.

Gallente weapons with rounded, complex shapes and saturated colors...

Minmatar weapons with strong, angular frames that expose internal component.

More earth tones, with tribal markings.

Fancy Amarr weapons - metallic surfaces, with decorative shapes and etched devotional prayers.

Building designs:

You know what I am going to say by now, right?

The same elements that shaped the armor, weapons and vehicles or a race are reflected in their architecture. There are some elements that will be the same - buidings are buildings, after all. But if we don't want our environments to all blend together, we need to push distinctions.

Environments:

Dust514 initially planned for vast, wide-open battlefields, (Much like EA's Battlefield) where players would need vehicles to cross distances quickly.

However, we soon found that we needed to create denser "combat areas" that had more cover, objectives, and items of interest.

Drones:

The drones were created as a neutral force - rogue autonomous AIs, that would engage anyone. The were an opportunity for us to put more PvE elements into what was (like EVE) primarily a PvP game.