Hellgate: London Developer Diary #3

German gaming site Krawall.de has tossed up a third Hellgate: London developer diary, this time with art director David Glenn fielding the text.

The inhabitants of our post-apocalyptic London have taken up refuge in the relative safety of the tube stations whilst the demons continue to wreak havoc above ground. The survivors then use the interconnecting tube tunnels to navigate between the stations and move about the world. The tube stations themselves are another area in which we tried to retain the specific look and feel of their real world counter parts, but without being precisely literal. Unfortunately, we never received permission to replicate the official Underground logo (the roundel) but alas, we do feel like we captured the spirit of the stations even without some of the iconic markings.

Beyond capturing the basics of London as a city environment, our story takes place a few decades into the future and a number of years after demons have successfully defeated the majority of human civilization. The result is a world overrun by demons but not entirely transformed. Small groups of survivors have found each other, banded together in survivable pockets of safety (the Tube Stations) and are mounting attacks from within. We wanted a modern look, but enough into the future that we could invent a few new technologies for our characters to take advantage of. We didn’t go crazy with a sci-fi interpretation of what London might be like in 20 years, so therefore no flying cars or crazy floating anti-gravity buildings or such. We didn’t want a crazy vision of the future interfering with the basic premise of the setting. Comparing London in 1987 versus 2007 is a good example of how slow to change major cities truly are. Our key change is the destruction and (hellification) brought about by the demons.