Surreal deep-sea adventure Silt dives onto PS5 & PS4 on June 1

blog.playstation.com:

Hi everyone! I’m Dom, programmer at Spiral Circus, and I’m really excited to share the news that our surreal underwater adventure Silt is coming to PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on June 1.

Silt is a puzzle-adventure set deep within a harrowing ocean abyss, where you play as a lone diver searching the deep and exploring dangerous waters to uncover long-forgotten mysteries. But the diver has a secret. Harnessing an unusual power, you’ll be able to possess sea creatures that roam the ocean void, discovering new creatures and using their unique abilities to solve puzzles, traverse the environment, and make your way deeper into the darkness.

With the game only a few weeks away, we wanted to share one of the processes we’ve developed to bring our artist Tom’s traditional ink-on-paper art from still imagery into an interactive game world.

From pen-and-ink drawings to game assets

Getting Tom’s artwork into the game would be the biggest technical challenge for us. It was essential that the game looked like one of Tom’s paintings and not like his art had been transplanted out of context into something else. The idea was to give Tom near total control over the look of the game right from inside the drawing program. This means control over composition, camera framing, tonal contrast, lighting, shadow, texture, fog, all the stuff he would just draw naturally if he were working on one of his pieces. 

We had to find a way to let Tom do all this, while retaining the ability to reconstruct the whole thing in the game engine and make it interactive. We used layers in the drawing program to keep logical elements separated from each other, then wrote a script to churn through the layers and convert them into something the game engine