Red Pluto | Alfie Bramley

Red Pluto is an atmospheric survival crafting game set in the far future, on the surface of a war-torn Pluto. I worked on the game in the capacity of a concept artist, environment artist and level designer, and this page is a showcase of the various parts I contributed.

Companion Bot: An unimplemented concept for a friendly robot helper.

Crashed Ship: The final area of the game, revealing how you arrived on Pluto.

Level Design: My work on the different areas of the game, from start to end.

Companion Bot

The Companion Bot was a sadly unimplemented idea of a friendly NPC that the player could build. This bot would act as a portable light source and would point out areas of interest that the player had not fully explored, even potentially leading to important quest areas.

The idea was that the bot would be created out of necessity and improvisation: the player character is clearly an experienced engineer and builder, being able to design and build whole livable structures, but the amount of resources available to them would be limited, and so the overall aesthetic was intended to be souped-up and ramshackle.

While this would fit the style of the game, being more rough-and-tumble, it could also serve to give the bot a more personal touch: I was a particular fan of the idea of having visible pieces of duct tape or having loose wires and plates in order to silently tell the tale of the player assembling the bot with whatever they have.

The initial set of concepts were highly experimental: I wished to attempt a design using a variety of different shape languages, using a single initial design for its 'eye' for clarity in comparison.

My reasoning for making many of the designs float was to both emphasize their shape and to make it easier for the bot to make its way about the in-game world: from my prior talks with the 3D artists and the programmers, it seemed that it was much easier to make something float than it was to give it realistic legs. Personally, I also thought it would make for a cute moment for when the bot first activated to begin floating off the ground and into the air.

Of these designs, the favoured one amongst the rest of the team was number 10: hence, I carried it over to the next stage.

The second set of concepts focused on the friendly, round shape language of the original favoured design, with the emphasis on the large 'eye' and the spherical body.

I cast about for friendly or familiar objects in the real world for inspiration, and you can probably notice that 3 and 5 look rather like a certain chocolate cake and a roomba, respectively. As I felt more confident in the general design, I also leaned more into the bot having a distinctive power button and a flashlight taped on somewhere to its frame, and tried to frame a number of its designs around that.

The favoured design amongst our team was a mix between 1, 2 and 3: a result which highly interested me. The large round body with the insectoid legs became the reference going forward.

The third set of concepts focused on the finer details of shape and form, as the overall shape language and aesthetic had been decided on collectively.

I was largely aiming for a 'cute insect' look: I wanted to use the flashlight taped on the bot as much as I could, since I felt it inherently told a story and made the bot feel helpful. This was helpful because surprisingly, this was probably the most challenging part of the design for me: trying to make relatively small changes feel meaningful and give variety to the viewer. However, in addition to the cuteness, I had to ensure it would be a practical design to weather the terrain of a war-torn Pluto.

Of these designs, a blend of 6, 7 and 8 was decided upon: the body shape was good, but the face just needed tweaking.

The fourth set of concepts changed very little, and I used it as an opportunity to experiment with fine details such as the placement of the flashlight and the pattern in the bot's 'eye' and over its body. It hadn't exactly been said aloud by the team, but the flashlight now felt pretty central to the bot's design.

In the bottom-middle and bottom-right of the page, you can see a number of iterations on the head and eye, experimenting with different frames and patterns. The team had requested alternatives to the large round eye, which hadn't really occurred to me because I felt the design was fairly friendly and identifiable on its own: however, I decided to push the boat out on the iterations, and when it became too inconvenient to fit them all onto this page, I decided to make a whole new one where the team could pick and choose their favourites.

This set of designs for the eye and face was done, in my mind, rather like a 'buffet menu': it was designed for the other members of the team to simply select a whole head, face and/or eye that they preferred, and the ones that were agreed upon would become the chosen design.

I thought that a round circular design would work best, and so it can be seen that the majority of ideas were indeed circular. It was rather a surprise to me when the favoured design turned out to be the fourth one on the top row: what I would call the 'starry eye'.

The reasoning was that the 'starry' look stood out on the bot's face, and because it added a layer of complexity and 'otherness' to them that might be overlooked otherwise.

With all that in mind, the final thing to do was to give the 3D artists a suitable turnaround to model from, and to flesh out the possibilities that the 'starry' face offered. I grew to like the design greatly, as it potentially allowed for a rather complex but unique form of communication with the bot which could enhance its usefulness. As can be seen, I drew ideas for it giving the player directions, alerting them to danger, and showing 'emotions' to comfort both the character and the player themselves.

I thoroughly enjoyed designing this little guy, and while I am disappointed he couldn't make it into the end product, I think the idea was solid and I am proud of my work. Also, on a technical level, it would have taken a lot of work for our already overworked designers and programmers to implement them properly, and I would not have wished that upon them.

Crashed Ship

The Crashed Ship is an impressive part of the game's background, being visible from the moment the player emerges from their crashed escape pod, and only being fully explorable once the player has collected all of their upgrades. Story-wise it is also highly significant, being the reason for the player being stranded on Pluto in the first place: rather like Subnautica, the player was travelling on this ship when it was struck by something that caused it to crash, forcing the player into an escape pod in order to survive. This also renders the player as being the only survivor, condemning them to an uncertain but lonely fate.

The two screenshots to the left show the ship from the view approaching it, in both the red daylight of the dying sun, and under the stars at night. The idea was that, like Subnautica, the ship should be a later-game area, but it should be visible from the beginning of the game in order to clue in observant players to what has befallen their character. Players are unable to safely explore the ship from the get-go, however: attempts to do so will result in their suit running out of power and oxygen, which will rapidly kill them and reset them to the beginning. The player is therefore given an incentive to upgrade their suit and find blueprints for buildings and vehicles that will allow them to traverse Pluto's harsh environment safely. When they have reached that point, they will be able to finally explore the ship and reach the uppermost level of the explorable area.

This was a fascinating piece of the game to work on, due to it being significant for area design, quest design, art style and narrative. As you may expect, a lot of the team was involved, and it was my personal privilege to actualise the idea in both 2D and 3D form.

The initial set of concepts were aided by the other artist in the team. They helpfully provided their own concept of what a space station may look like (as can be seen top left) and their concepts for building styles and assets (bottom of the picture). The rationale was that the player would arrive in a ship that would have a similar style to the buildings, in order to visually separate it from the various wrecks and ruins that the player would encounter through their exploration.

My quick silhouette sketches went in the opposite direction from the provided references as I wanted to experiment with the most 'out-there' options first. I also wanted to do it in case, through my experiments, a silhouette was found which could work for a different faction or style. All the silhouettes here felt too limited, and so a more in-depth set was needed.

These silhouettes are the first set in which I put my head down and just went for it. I found a great deal of satisfaction in creating weird and wacky shapes, and then flipping them around an axis and mirroring them to create a symmetrical shape. 9 times out of 10, it looked like a ship that could fly.

The varied and rather exciting shapes were well received, but there was a glaring flaw that was quickly pointed out: each of these silhouettes was cool, but none of them made one think of a large transport vessel. Instead, each of these silhouettes either resembled a small fighter vessel, or was too alien-looking to truly believe it was of human construction.

To go forwards, I was encouraged to focus on bulkier sizes and more rectangular shapes: the engines from 8 and the bridge from 2 were lauded as good directions.

To bring the advice I had received to light, I decided to omit any 'wing' like structures in favour of larger engines and bridges. I still wanted to try interesting shapes like rings and points, with the thought being that such shapes may be more practical for aerodynamism or construction. Additionally, looking at existing real-world spacecraft, you see a lot of them are curved and pointed: given that this ship is a far-flung descendant of current technology, it seemed only sensible to attempt to incorporate such shapes in my concepts.

Of these designs, the team favoured the bulky bridges from 3 and 7, the shape of the engines from 1 and 6, and the overall body shape from 2 and 5. The overall comment was that the ship would likely be boxy and square, given it was a common vessel built for space not speed: therefore, going forwards, I would go for less sleek and curvy shapes.

This final set of concepts really focused on the idea that the ship should be square, and almost rough. The reasoning was that, in this age, space travel is not a big deal, and so ships are built more for the purpose of simply travelling than they are for looking good. As such, the ship would be functionally aerodynamic and streamlined, but its primary function would be transportation, and as such, it would be built around having a large cargo hold. This would, in turn, reduce its speed and efficiency, and it would make up for this by having larger engines, rather like a banged-up old car.

Of the concept silhouettes here, the one voted for most enthusiastically was number 6: it had the most suitably sized engines, an appropriately boxy form without becoming back-heavy, and a relatively streamlined form without looking alien or expensive. I whole-heartedly agreed with the decision.

With the silhouette decided on, it was then a matter of building it into a believable space ship shape. I began with the top-down silhouette and drew it out onto its side, marking out the parts where the form dipped and changed in size. I then drew out shapes that made sense for me: a more pointed angular shape in the front to allow for easier travel, an elevated section to act as the bridge, and a steadily rising and expanding form to house the cargo hold and the engines.

Once the silhouettes were done, I created an approximate 45 degree angle line drawing, and then went over the drawing with shades of grey. For clarity, I ensured that areas of the same angle were given the same shade of grey: I was rather pleased when my team mistook the greyscale drawing for a 3D model. With a 3D shape agreed upon, the next step was finalising the concepted look.

To finalise the look, it was decided that the logical step would be to decide exactly what each section of the ship was used for. In turn, this would allow us to decide exactly how to structure the ship to allow the player to explore it in the in-game world. I took the side-on silhouette and translated the angled lineart onto it to create a cutaway, and then consulted cutaways and maps of real sailing vessels to decide on an sensible layout.

I had initially thought that the player would be able to explore through at least two major corridors and the elevator, with them leaving the ship through the cargo bay. While the team finally settled on simplifying it, the bay exit idea was kept.

As I had the most intimate knowledge of the ship's layout, I was given the job of building it in 3D as a wreck. In order to know exactly how I was going to model it, I had to know how it was going to be wrecked: I started therefore by making a low-poly model of the ship in a very similar style to its original greyscale drawing. I then placed it in-engine and modeled some pieces of rock and ice around it, to simulate how it could look in-game. I then went further and mapped out where the ship had crashed and what exactly had happened to it, placing debris and a visible trail leading from outside the playable area.

The final story of the ship was that it had fallen out of the atmosphere and landed on its belly atop the crater, where it skidded down before careening over the edge and impaling itself on the rock beneath it.

With this story in mind, the damage the ship would take became clearer. The nose would be almost completely bent if not outright flattened, and the forward keel of the ship would be scraped back and dented upwards into the ship itself. As the ship scraped along, the port side would have dented outwards, and as it toppled over and fell it would have struck a hardy piece of rock and been split open. This gaping wound in its side would then become the improvised entrance for the player, allowing them to get inside the ship. It would also provide a great view from a distance, seeing this once great vessel now effectively skinned and disemboweled.

I took the screenshot of the in-game ship model with darker lightning, and I used it as a base for a paintover. This ensured greater fidelity to the design without taking too much time. I looked up images of crashed cars and broken machinery as inspiration, and I tried to really convey this sense of the metal shape being twisted and bent, ripped off of its supports and scattered away in the chaos. My team were very excited by the result, and all they asked for was a shaded version.

Having the outline sorted and agreed upon by the team already, adding the shading was a breeze in comparison. I opted for no black outlines in this one in order to make it easier for everyone in the team to visualise this being a physical model in-engine, as opposed to simply another drawing.

The response was very good: the team liked that the ship looked clearly wrecked yet recognisable, and that the way to enter the ship through its ripped-open side was suitably visceral and improvised. To the player, it would serve as a great landmark of their progress through the game: by the time they reach the ship they would have gone through multiple ruined buildings, destroyed robots and devastated land, so to not only ascend out of the crater but to go through a ship that clearly fell out of the sky would be a great moment. It would bring the player's experience to a full close, with them going through the ship they arrived on and finally reaching the outer edge of the crater. From that point on, the player would be left to wonder what may befall their character, out there on the surface of Red Pluto.

Level Design

The first step I took on designing the world of Red Pluto was this piece of environment concept art. At this stage, the idea for Red Pluto was only just forming, and so the brief was fairly basic: it takes place on Pluto, in the distant future, and the surface has been razed by a war between the last surviving humans in the face of the Sun becoming a red giant and swallowing up Earth.

My interpretation of events was that, given how unbelievably cold Pluto is, explosives set off on the surface could melt the nitrogen ice before it flash-froze again, forming bubbles of ice caught mid-blast as if frozen in time. I tried to lean more into the weirdness of seeing these frozen phenomena and of the size in comparison to the character, but also the loneliness: you can see the character's footprints behind them on the ice, and it is clear they are the only one around.

The next general concept for Red Pluto's environment was a concept for the view the player may have around them. The view we settled on that would be a cool general background was a cryovolcano: a phenomenon that really occurs on Pluto, where liquid nitrogen bubbles up from beneath the surface and explosively jettisons into the atmosphere instead of molten rock. This material often then solidifies due to the freezing temperatures, which would provide a hazard for the player while also being a potential source of resources.

As an initial idea, this concept played with the possibility of the player being able to climb to higher vantage points before needing to slip back down into the crater, or even under the broken ice altogether to explore underground. In this case, the cryovolcano would be seen as the highest vantage point, and thus the ultimate goal to work towards.

After some discussion with the team, it was decided that creating some different ideas for explorable areas would be a good idea: it was all well and good throwing around cool ideas, but without actualizing or visualizing any of them in a tangible form they would stay as cool ideas only.

I made these four concept drawings based on a quick discussion with the designers for a reasonable progression: the player would emerge from their escape pod amidst heaps of salvageable debris (the 'Debris Cliffs'), which they could use to fashion a rudimentary upgrade and allow them to descend further, finding the ruined military base and exploring within to find out what happened to the people there. Fully exploring the base would confirm their suspicions by confronting them with the wreck of a spaceship, likely the one that brought them down to Pluto in the first place.

Following on from the previous set of concepts and discussion with the rest of the team, it was somewhat decided that while the progression sounded good, it would be too much work in the short time frame we had to properly implement an interior explorable area full of loot and story, when the actual story was still basic in description. In addition, we now had a basic world built in-engine, which had been modeled on real normal maps scanned from Pluto's surface. We decided that, in order to limit the explorable world and thus give ourselves an easier world to work with, we would set the explorable area within a crater. Thus, the task became: fill a crater with interesting things that make sense and are distinct from each other.

I drew the two maps while i was in the meeting in which we discussed this decision. I pulled from the idea of the debris cliffs and placed the escape pod, the start of the game, on the spot I named 'The Plateau': this would give the player a high vantage point and allow them to see the rest of the game open up before them. They would then descend the debris-strewn steppes before them, losing sight of the other areas aside from the one immediately before them, 'The Lake'. This area would introduce the player to environmental hazards and storytelling, as the lake of liquid nitrogen would hurt them if they got too close and outright kill them if they fell in, but they can safely traverse it by using the body of a derelict mech. From here, they would descend to 'The Forest', clamber out into 'The Graveyard', slip under the ice in 'The Fractures' and work their way through subterranean caverns and past the remains of the mechanized army before finally arriving at 'The Peak', the cryovolcano. Here, they could see, find or build a way to escape, and end the game.

My ideas were fairly well received, but there was some confusion over the player following a specific route: if the player started off at a vantage point, why descend down out of it? What would prevent them from just going a different way? And, most of all, wouldn't the impact of an escape pod force them down? Bearing these points, and the existing game world, in mind, I drew up a new map.

This one followed the same linear idea, but we felt as a team it made more sense: keeping the player feeling alone and isolated at the beginning would make the moment when the world opened up or changed more exciting, and entice them to press on. Furthermore, it would keep them guessing as to what they were going to encounter next.

What actually came next was the conceptualization of the areas themselves. By now it had basically been decided that the team wanted the 'Ice Forest' and the 'Frozen Explosion' as areas for the player to explore, and I was very excited to work on them. The first area I really wanted to do was the forest, and so I did. I was particularly inspired by photographs of lighthouses that had been covered in frozen seawater, forming long and twisting tendrils of ice. Using this as a base, I postulated that on Pluto the ice formations would be much more impressive, enough to form a whole 'forest'.

The first concept piece focused largely on the 'tree' itself, with the rationale that the exposed power cores of the wrecked warbots would cause temperature spikes, and thus, wind storms. These wind storms would pick up melted ice and hurl it against itself as it froze, forming these hostile, twisting trees.

The concept piece was well-received by the team, but as time was short, it was requested that for the sake of the environment artist (singular) that I do a paintover of the existing in-engine area in order to demonstrate the desired look, design and atmosphere. I happily complied and took a screenshot of all the areas in-game which required a paintover. For the forest, the team had roughly placed a large warbot and scattered a few ice spikes around to simply say 'this area will be occupied.' This meant it was ripe for me to give it a complete makeover.

I followed on from the idea of the warbot's power core being the cause of the ice storm, and shaped the trees so that they would all seem to be being 'blown' in one direction. I thought that having the ice formations block off parts of the wall or be a physical obstacle for the player to navigate through would be a good touch, or even if the player was required to take shelter from flying icicles behind the larger ice structures. The core idea I wished to convey, however, was a sense of the uncanny: at the bottom of it all, something that looks organic is very out of place on Pluto, and is a visual throwback to the now-lost Earth. As such, having the trees not be trees at all, but the result of something much more hostile, is a great way to remind the player of the game's context through a sense of nostalgia. The character will never see real trees, only these twisted accidents created from human meddling.

The final step in creating the forest was the 3D modelling and assembling, and this was largely taken care of by the principal environment artist. However, as I had been key to the creation of the area, I was asked to do the final touches to the area to ensure it was how I envisioned it: something I took as an honour.

There was very little I changed in the final area, save for a personal tweak where I created a swirling path of ice around the warbot in the centre: this both allowed the player to climb up and grab it's exposed power core, and made the warbot seem imprisoned, as if it could wake up at any moment. The forest in its final form is a treasure trove of ice, a minable resource for the player, but it is also desperately cold, effectively necessitating the use of the SP-00-DER mech (one of the highlights of the game, the rideable spider robot) in order to survive. While it is no longer a required area for the player to travel through, it now functions as a reward for the player who explores: an icy, hostile echo of the long-lost homeworld, and the closest thing to Earth they can get.

With the 'Forest' and the crashed ship, the last area that had been a constant from the beginning was the 'Battlefield', in which the team (and me in particular) wanted to see a huge frozen explosion. The easiest way to explain this area was that it was the site of the climactic final battle between the warring fragments of humanity, in which a bomb (most likely nuclear in nature) was detonated beneath the ice, destroying everything caught in the blast and flinging debris for miles around. This tremendous act of destruction could also further explain the ruined bases around the map, and the lack of other survivors.

To get the look, I researched water droplets, ripples, and rapid freezing: while Pluto is made mostly of nitrogen ice rather than water, I had no actual examples of nitrogen acting in a specific way, and so I had to assume it would behave similarly to water. In any case, it looks cool, and sometimes that's fine.

As with the 'Forest', an in-engine paintover was requested and delivered upon. This time, I went for rounder and more bubbly shapes as opposed to twisting and spiky: I wanted to convey danger, but I felt that the frozen bodies of mechs caught in the frozen blast would convey it on their own. The large bubbles would be intimidating due to their sheer size, and what they represented would become evident as the player investigated further. While the 'Forest' is hostile, the 'Battlefield' is somber: a graveyard to all those who came before the player, and a memorial to the grim consequences of humanity's wars.

With this concept, I still held open the possibility of the ice breaking beneath the player and acting as another hazard for them to avoid: however, this sadly was not able to be implemented into the final game.

As with the crashed ship, I was asked to take charge of modelling the frozen explosion. To be as faithful as possible to the idea of it being flash-frozen liquid, I modelled half of a sphere and hollowed it out, then cut away sections of it and deformed it. Once I had done this, I duplicated the outside sphere and inverted the faces, before making it slightly smaller and attaching the faces of the inner and outer semi-spheres to each other. Then, I increased the poly count a little and deformed it further, making some parts thicker and some parts thinner to give a more convincing sense of weight and physicality. I must say I was rather pleased with the result, and even more so when it was placed in-engine.

The final in-game area is one of the biggest in the game. The walk up to the explosion is fairly bland, save for some mineable rocks and ice shards, but the bubble is unavoidable, and provides some welcome protection from the nightly meteor showers and debris hail. Caught in the bubble, the player can find a half-destroyed SP-00-DER mech, and from it they can learn how to build one of their own. Just behind the bubble, they can find another wrecked warbot which contains the most advanced suit upgrade, giving the player the greatest amount of protection they can acquire. Somewhat ironic, given that this protection didn't save those who were there before.

In the screenshots, I show the explosion from a distance, from the approach, and from just underneath it. This hopefully gives a sense of the scale of the area, and in turn, the size of the explosion that caused it. The unspoken story behind this is that, by now in humanity's future, devices we would consider Weapons of Mass Destruction are commonplace: the decision to use it on possibly the last remaining living humans has been made, and at a grim cost.

The narrative told through the environments of Red Pluto is a bleak one. At the time of development, Covid-19 was upon the world, and the threat of nuclear war hangs over the air like smoke even to this day. I would not say Red Pluto is pessimistic so much as it is cautionary: we of course have no idea that such a tale WILL take place, but if humanity continues to have self-absorbed and callous leaders, then someday, there will be a final command. A last living human. Are things like money or oil worth it?

It was said by T.S.Elliot at the end of his poem The Hollow Men: 'This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.' While a profound quote, there is always the chance that it actually is a bang: this is the end that Red Pluto depicts, leaving the player character to do the whimpering.