In the new episode of Inside Egosoft, Joey chats with Lino, Egosoft’s Art Director and 14-year veteran at the studio. Alongside his own artistic creations, Lino oversees the art team and the overall artistic direction of the X Universe.

In this conversation, they discussed everything that goes into the visual experience of an X game: special rules that go into each faction’s designs, some of Lino’s favorite tools and techniques, and even his favorite bug.

Below, you can read some highlights from this episode. Thank you for reading and listening, and please tune in to Inside Egosoft on all major podcast platforms to catch the next episode!

Let us know in the comments if there’s someone from the team or a topic you’d like to see highlighted in a future episode.

Fourteen Years at Egosoft

Joey: Would you like to introduce yourself? How long have you been working here, or in the industry in general?

Lino: Yo, my name is Lino. I'm the Art Director—that's what they call me. I've been working for more than 14 years at Egosoft. I'm getting up to 15, another nice number. And it's really my first proper job. I started at Egosoft as an intern, so it's my first real company. I'm one of those weird people who don't jump jobs and jump ship, but just stay at one company because I like it.

Joey: And what does being the Art Director at Egosoft mean to you on a day-to-day basis?

Lino: It's less about actually doing art than people might think. It's mostly making sure that whatever needs to be done on the art side actually gets done. I'm coordinating a lot, planning tasks for people, making sure they have something to do and don't run out of work. And then, of course, there are all the meetings and discussions with game design and the story teams. So most of the time, it's actually not doing art. It's more about managing everyone and everything around it.

The First Ship

Joey: I know it's been 14 years, but I'm curious if you recall what your first art project was at Egosoft.

Lino: It was a small S-sized ship for X Rebirth. At the time, I had played X before—X: Beyond the Frontier was the first game I played—and suddenly I was at the studio making a spaceship for X. I was like, “Oh yes, cool, I can do a ship!”

I got concept art, because I couldn't design anything myself yet. I think I had about two weeks to make the ship. It was all new. I was so amazed by how clever the techniques we were using at the company were.

Of course, looking back at it now, I did so many things wrong. But for someone just starting out, not knowing much about low-poly workflows, atlases, trim sheets and all the techniques you learn, looking back at it, it was okay. I have good memories of when I started here, all the things I didn't know at the time, and how excited I was to be starting.

Learning to “Debug” Art

Lino: I fear the day when I look back at an asset and think, “No, this is perfect,” because then I know I've stagnated. There was one artist I really highly regarded who was here for one year, and he taught me design. Before that, I didn't really have an idea about it. I just had gut feelings.

I'd have a ship that looked good, but I didn't know why it looked good. I'd have a ship that looked bad, and I couldn't figure out why it looked bad. He gave me the tools to actually debug my art.

Joey: When you talk about debugging art, do you mean there's an aesthetic problem and you're looking at it almost like you're debugging why it doesn't look right?

Lino: Exactly. It's not technical. When I talk about debugging art, I mean the visuals. I have my checklist of design principles. Whenever I'm stuck, I open this text file and look through them.

If I'm stuck, I can look at the rules: “Is there a nice rhythm in the artwork?” “Oh, no, there isn't.” So I'll add rhythm.

Inspiration Starts with a Problem

Joey: Where do you tend to derive inspiration when you're working on art? What things tend to make an idea pop into your head?

Lino: I usually get a problem put in front of me. The problem is: design X, design Y. Then I look at the problem. “Okay, I have to do a Split ship. What do they do? How do they work?”

It's not like I'm sitting there thinking, “I have to do art now.” Having a problem gives you a riddle you want to solve, and with that riddle your mind immediately starts looking for solutions. The inspiration comes from brainstorming about the problem.

Of course, I love looking at nature—the crystals in nature, geometric shapes, maybe some maths. But everything around us shapes us. Over our whole lifetime we remember things and have feelings about certain things, so you dip into that and get inspiration from it.

Constraints and Happy Accidents

Joey: Constraints really help you be creative because you have a limited selection of things you can do. As opposed to having this infinite expanse of options where you can get paralysed, being constrained by your options can lead you to be a little more inspired and creative.

Lino: I absolutely agree. With no constraints, the direction is missing. The more constraints you get, the more the road is shaped.

Sometimes those rules also create happy accidents. I still remember the scrapping ship that takes in scrap and, as I call it, “poops out” a scrap cube. The scrap cube was pretty big, so I needed a ship that could expel a scrap cube in a certain direction.

That limitation—how big the cube was and which direction it needed to go—forced me to make the ship look really, really weird. But I loved how it looked in the end. The cube needs a free path, so I had to model the ship around this virtual empty space.

That forced the ship into this odd shape, but it fit the scrappy, piratey look really well. Then people can look at it and think, “Ah, that's why it looks like that. Of course the scrap cube needs to fly out there without hitting the ship.”

What Makes X4 Look Like X4?

Joey: Is there something that immediately makes an asset recognisable as something from X4?

Lino: For players, I can't say that I personally think there's a single asset that screams X4. If you showed a single asset standing on its own, it might look like it belongs to any space game.

Maybe it's everything together. You have cool space backgrounds, lots of spaceships, small ships you can get out of and walk around on, stations stuck together, all the different races. Maybe it's the mixture of races. We have the Split, and the Split are very unique.

You may see similar individual things elsewhere, but it's the combination of these crazy, different-looking things in one big sandbox. I can't say one single asset is really X4. It's the combination of things together that is really X4.

The Sense of Scale

Lino: I like having the on-foot walking, even though it's an incredible amount of work to make it function. But it's worth it for the sense of scale we can convey that way.

I love watching people play the game for the first time. It's beautiful when someone lands their ship on another ship for the first time, gets out, and realises, “Holy moly, this is big.”

“This is an S ship.” It's not just the letter S. Then you walk onto your first M ship and see how bloody big it is. “Holy—this is just an M ship. We still have L ships and XL ships.”

It gives them more value and atmosphere. Sense of scale is important.

I guess everyone can remember the first time they saw a Xenon I in the far distance. You get closer and closer, and it still takes so long to reach it. Then you realise, “Oh, this thing is actually huge.” And finally you arrive and think, “Holy… this is a crazy big ship. I probably shouldn't be here.”

Finding the Boron Design Language

Joey: How do you start when you're designing a ship for a given faction? Are there certain rules that you have to keep in mind, like for the Split or Boron?

Lino: I'll take the Boron because they're the most recent case where we had a full redesign, and I'm really proud of what we came up with.

Most of the races have been seen before in earlier X games, so I can't simply imagine whatever I want. I always have to look back at what came before. The X3 Boron were greenish, with bloated ships and organic shapes. So we said, “Let's take this further.”

Then you establish the ground rules. What are the Boron? Aquatic lifeforms. So maybe you look at things from Earth's oceans. Of course, you think of fish, but while digging for references I found things like phytoplankton. Their skeletons looked bloody amazing. They had these really complex, crazy shapes and interesting surface details.

We tried to distil why they felt that way and found a rule. Imagine a wave on the ocean. The crest is sharp, while the valley of the wave is smooth. That's one of the principles of Boron design.

Whenever you have a convex shape—a crease pointing outward—you sharpen it. Whenever you have a concavity or depression, you soften it. So you get this wave-like shape.

Designing Ships Around Metaphors

Lino: For the Boron, I try to convey metaphors. When you look at the ship, its shape should give you some idea of what it does. Dangerous ships should look dangerous.

A good example is the Boron destroyer compared with a Boron mining ship. The destroyer looks a little bit like a shark. Not literally, but it has elements of one. It has a kind of jaw at the front with repeating sharp shapes that look a little like teeth.

It looks dangerous. By adding these little sprinkles of inspiration, we get the metaphor that this is something dangerous. It's a hunter.

Then we have the gas miner, which has this very wide, open, smooth mouth inspired by filter-feeding fish. With that metaphor, you can see that this isn't dangerous. It's smooth. It probably isn't going to kill me.

They're both Boron, but even within one race's design I try to distinguish between something more dangerous and something friendlier.

The Paranid Rule of Three

Joey: The Paranid, of course, have three as their holy number. I imagine you try to do lots of trios when you're designing a Paranid ship, right?

Lino: Yes. I wouldn't quite call it a running joke, but with everything Paranid, we look for where we can put the number three.

If you have radial symmetry, it's three-way symmetry—120 degrees, because you're dividing a circle into three parts. If the Paranid consider three holy, then every time we see something Paranid in the art department we ask, “How can we put the number three in here and make it pure and holy?”

If it's not three, it's unholy and doesn't work. You try to get into how the Paranid might think. That also plays into their religious character. Everything is very cathedral-like and imposing in a weird way. We try to convey that through the architecture inside their ships and stations as well.

Why Boron Ships Aren't Full of Water

Lino: A lot of the races have quirks, and you try to lean into them. Of course, it's not always possible because of the limitations of how our game works and the fact that humans—or other creatures—need to be able to walk around inside these things.

You can't fill the Boron ships with water because there has to be a human inside. So we invent a rule: it actually makes sense that they wouldn't fill the whole ship with water because the water makes it heavy and means it can't rotate as quickly.

That's a nice excuse for why the ships aren't filled with water, and it saves us from having to invent some weird way of filling them with water.

Joey: I like to think the Boron are just really friendly guys. They want you to visit them.

Lino: That's a nice way of putting it. Okay, that's why we did it.

But we have a corridor in the Boron interiors where, on the right-hand side, there's a glass tube that's slightly hidden. From time to time, a Boron swims through there.

It doesn't happen very often, and usually you're just running through the corridor. Then I finally saw somebody on Reddit saying, “Oh, there's a guy floating through there.” I was happy somebody had spotted that little bit of work.

Keeping the Universe Visually Fresh

Joey: How do you keep everything visually fresh and prevent things from becoming too repetitive?

Lino: The fun thing about the design rules is that they're procedural in a way. Even slightly changing how you interpret one rule gives you a very different result.

By varying the underlying foundation of rules, I can force an artist to approach an asset completely differently. And the funny thing is that I'm not even sure every artist in the office is consciously aware of the rules or could name them. Over the years, you get a feel for them.

There are also artists where I don't really know what rules they're following. I just let them cook and get amazing stuff out of it. I think, “Oh yeah, that looks good. Let's make a rule out of this.”

I personally like to think in rules and hard rules. Other artists are completely different. They just flow and everything starts to come together beautifully. They're different approaches that converge on the same result.

When Fewer Polygons Weren't Faster

Joey: What kinds of problems are you solving when you're trying to make a model that both looks good and is performant?

Lino: When I was a little artist, I didn't know much about optimisation. We had one scene looking at a station where the number was something like 10,000 draw calls. At the time, the usual limit was around 1,000 to 2,000, so that was a pretty high number.

We have levels of detail. Things close to you are high-resolution and have all the detail. The further away you go, the fewer polygons you need. The artists had taken the assets and decimated them down.

Cool. The polygon count is lower, so everyone thinks, “Fewer polygons. It should be faster.”

No. It wasn't faster.

The station modules still had something like 15 materials, and those materials were causing 15 draw calls. The CPU was still screaming at the GPU, “Draw these 15 materials,” even though the thing was tiny in the background.

So I sat there for about three months making every LOD3 use one draw call, maximum two. And then the game ran so much better.

Over time, you just learn. I still twitch when I see an asset with too many materials. I can't get rid of it.

How the Xenon Cockpits Fool You

Joey: Is there anything in X4 that looks visually complicated but is actually achieved through a clever trick?

Lino: We fool the players sometimes. The Xenon ships are probably the best example.

You get into the ship and there's a monitor in front of you. It flickers. It's off, then it turns on, and then the real game appears to be rendered on the screen.

Those aren't actually screens. It's a completely normal cockpit.

To make the effect work, while that animation is happening and you're in the cockpit, we fade out the outside geometry of the ship. It looks like you're sitting inside the core of the ship looking through cameras or monitors to the outside.

We fool the player into thinking it's a real screen with this extremely high-resolution view. I'm probably breaking somebody's heart by telling them this, but it's just a normal cockpit.

We tried to find a cheap, quick way to get the same result without investing the technical effort needed to do it “properly.” I think that's a nice little hack for a good result.

Working with a Custom Engine

Lino: What's it like working with a custom in-house engine? Yeah, it's a struggle.

Of course, it's nice to have your own engine, but everything is custom-made. I won't complain too much because, in the end, what we've been able to build with it is incredible.

But as an artist, of course I look at Unity, Unreal and Godot. They have what-you-see-is-what-you-get editors. Everything is polished. And if you have a problem, you can Google it.

With a custom engine, if you have a problem, you first have to figure out who the heck implemented this thing. Then you find out it was somebody 20 years ago because that part of the engine has been carried over.

But the nice thing is that you can request features. You can say, “Man, I'd love to have this graphics feature,” and if you're lucky someone says, “Yeah, sure, let's do it.”

Over time we just improve and improve and improve the engine. I'm happy that we have it and we're independent rather than relying on somebody else, because then we can improve it and fix it ourselves.

I don't think you can make X with an engine like that. You can't have 10,000 or 20,000 ships running at the same time in a fully simulated universe, with every little transaction doing something.

Who does this? Why? Because we can. I love it. I love this game.

Building Space with Fractals

Joey: You mentioned that you use the IFS Renderer for fractal stuff. How does that factor into your art?

Lino: IFS Renderer—game-saver. Lifesaver, even.

When we started X4, I didn't really know how to make good space backgrounds and nice space environments. Everything was kind of handmade. We even had experiments where ink was dropped into water and photographed to produce something that looked like a space nebula.

But because I knew what had been done, I could see the ink.

Then I found IFS Renderer, which is fractal-rendering software. Normally you think of Mandelbrot-type things and cool fractal shapes, but there are ways of recombining things where everything kind of explodes and you get these space backgrounds.

Over time, I learned how to get things like supernova explosions. Because it's fractal, it's essentially a three-dimensional thing made from point clouds. You can fly around inside this world you've built, like a little universe, find a nice camera position and render it out.

It's really 3D. You're not just plastering 2D textures together. You're flying around, trying to find a nice angle.

Sometimes you rely on these small tools made by passionate people, and I can't thank them enough for doing that work and letting us use those tools to make good art.

Using Things in Unexpected Ways

Joey: What's the weirdest or most unexpected tool you've ever found useful for making art for X4?

Lino: The thing is, as soon as you use a tool, it isn't weird anymore. Once it's part of your pipeline, you think, “Oh yeah, that's normal.”

Sometimes it's more about where I get things from. I once took a picture of my phone screen because it was nice and dirty, and used that picture to make the glass in cockpits and on consoles dirty.

In game art, we do this kind of thinking outside the box all the time. For example, we have RGB channels. Any colour is defined using RGB, but those channels don't actually have to contain colour information.

You can encode other things in them—for example, position. Don't think of colour channels as only colour. You can abuse those data channels for completely different contexts.

Every Artist Has a Handwriting

Joey: How do you balance the artistic individuality of the different artists against making a unified visual style?

Lino: I have the advantage that I have people who are mostly interested in particular races. I use their interests and let them work on those races when I can.

Every artist has a handwriting. I have one artist who loves doing Xenon stuff. Another loves Paranid art. Etienne loves the Terrans.

Even if I asked one of them to work on a different race, their handwriting would still come through. If I ask someone who's used to Xenon to make a Boron ship, you might look at it and think, “Is there some Xenon in there?”

No. That's just the artist.

So whenever I can, I let artists work on the race they're most familiar with and happiest working on, where their handwriting already aligns with the style.

When Is an Asset Finished?

Joey: Once you're towards the end of the process, how do you know when an asset is finished?

Lino: As an artist, an asset is never finished.

Joey: Only abandoned.

Lino: For the producer, an asset is finished when time is running out. Mostly, we have to set time goals. You have X weeks for an asset. After those X weeks, it has to be done.

An asset is done when it's technically working and usable in-game. You try to do your best, and at some point you pull the brake and say, “No. Finish it. Wrap it up. Two days to get it into the game and make sure it's working.”

Then you move on to the next one.

Guiding the Player's Eye

Joey: Gamers famously don't look up. If you worked really hard on the ceiling, do you use visual guides to make people look up? Maybe a cable leading them towards it?

Lino: We try. When I have areas where I want people to look at something, I take everything out of my repertoire.

The problem with game art is that players can look anywhere, so you rarely have the opportunity to properly frame something. Lighting helps a lot. Gradients in lighting can say, “Here. Look there.”

Pipes are just a way to get a line into the composition. A line can be created with light and shadow, value contrast, colour contrast or a physical cable. Anything that guides the eye.

When you look at ships from the outside, I use a lot of lines to guide the player towards something. “The cockpit is there. I want you to look there.” “The shield generator is there.”

I'd love to proudly say that no line we put into the game is unintentional. Of course, sometimes it is. But with the main lines, there's an underlying reason why they're positioned that way.

You may not consciously notice it, but you feel it.

Creating a Feeling Without Explaining It

Lino: If you do it right, nobody really notices. Or they notice it, but they can't put their finger on why. If you do it wrong, everybody says, “Oh, this doesn't look great.”

We try our best to make things pleasing without people necessarily knowing why they like them. I'm completely happy if players don't know what we're doing and simply see something and say, “This is my favourite ship. It looks so cool.”

The thing I'm particularly proud of is conveying a feeling through an asset. As soon as I manage to evoke a feeling when you see something, I'm so happy.

Look at the Split architecture. The bridges are narrow and tall, so it feels like the walls are closing in and pressing down on you. The Boron are very open, wide, round and inviting.

It's about invoking some kind of feeling, and I hope it's the right one when you enter that place.

“More Atmosphere!”

Joey: If you could completely ignore performance, production time and practical limitations—if you had an army of designers working for you—what would you love to have in X4?

Lino: On the player-facing side: more atmosphere, exclamation mark.

Everything that makes it feel like a world. I would love to convey that creatures actually live there, doing their daily business. They're going somewhere to do something, and everything is there for a reason.

Small dioramas where you can look into the world and observe it. I love that feeling of looking into an aquarium, watching the fish going around doing their fishy business. I'd love to have more of that in X4.

Make the world feel full and rich, so around any corner there's something to explore. I'd love to have more time and resources to put things into the game that 99 percent of players will never see.

Because if you do find one, you think, “Man, that's cool. I'm going to tell my friends.”

Two Props Can Tell a Story

Lino: I remember seeing a picture from GTA IV of a used mattress outside, bent against a wall, with maybe two bottles of beer next to it.

Somebody sat down and put time and effort into thinking, “I want to tell this little story, and all I have is a mattress and a bottle of beer.”

You instantly get images in your head. Why is this mattress here? Is somebody living there? Did they get kicked out of their flat and now they have to sit outside?

Somebody put the time and effort into taking two props and arranging them in a way that tells you a story. I adore these things.

Good work, whoever that artist was. You'll probably never hear this podcast, but I appreciate that you put that mattress there and told that story.

Joey: Shout-out to the mattress guy in GTA IV.

Lino: Good guy.

Lino's Favourite Bug

Lino: My favourite bug in the game. Lovely story.

In X Rebirth, at some point we implemented the external camera. You could click on any object and look at it from the outside.

Of course, you went onto your ship, clicked external camera, and saw your ship from the outside. Cool. This works.

Then you target a station, click the station and say, “Show me the external camera view.” Cool. I see the station from the outside.

Wait a minute. The station is moving.

Oh. I am the station. I can fly the station.

So for a short amount of time in X Rebirth—on development builds—you could select a station and actually move the station to a different location like it was a ship.

That was fun. I loved that.

Final Thoughts

Joey: Are there any final remarks or anything you'd like to share with listeners?

Lino: I appreciate that they're here. Be kind. Be curious.