Leading Space Engineers 2 art team
For Space Engineers 2, my main contribution was defining the core visual art style for the game, creating Guidelines and How-To guides highliting all visual aspects of the game such as Hard Surface design concepts, Color Pallete, Marketing Guidelines and similar pillar points. I was also leading and working on the creation of the new planetary content, with a special focus on the Earthlike planet Verdure and Marslike Kemik planets which were released in the Planets Update (December 1st, 2025) on Steam Store. Planet development for this update started back in 2022 and ran all the way through 2025, during which I was responsible for designing and executing most of the terrain-building pipeline – from the very first heightmap sketches to the final, playable planets shipped in the game.
On the technical side, I built a procedural world-creation workflow centered around Houdini and World Creator. In Houdini, I used heightfield tools for large-scale landform design, erosion, river carving, and terrain layering, keeping everything as non-destructive as possible so we could iterate quickly based on gameplay and performance feedback. These heightfields were then refined and art-directed in World Creator, where I focused on sculpting landmark silhouettes, shaping coastlines, and fine-tuning slopes, canyons, and plateaus to support interesting exploration and vehicle gameplay.
The result is a set of planets that are not only visually striking, but also built on a solid, fully procedural workflow that can be extended and reused for future content in the Space Engineers 2 universe.
Client: Keen Software House
Role: Art Lead
Category: GameDev
Date: August 2022 – 2025
What were my responsibilities as an Art Lead?
Briefly, my art team leading included:
- Creating hi-res 8K heightmaps and designing seamless environments for spherical planets
- Creating and teaching the team planetary assets pipeline
- Sculpting terrain and places of interest on planetary landscapes
- Sculpting and placing Boulders, Overhangs and Caves on planets
- Supervising visual quality of all 3D and 2D art in-game assets
- Creating marketing materials including logo and icon of the game
- Defining, keeping track and managing tasks in Jira
- Planning the work ahead based on available man power and time budget
- Recruiting top talent, senior artists to the team (creating job descriptions/requirements, test assignment tasks, interviewing candidates)
- Creating Onboarding Art Guidelines for new art team members
- Creating pipelines and workflows for specific tasks in the team
- Cross-team management of Art tasks (with Coders and QA)
- Regular SyncUps and feedback rounds for the whole team
- Quick paint-over sketches and concepts as part of feedback
Defining core Art Style for Space Engineers 2
My responsibilities, in addition to hands-on work on models and environments, included developing comprehensive Art Guides (Art Bibles) to align and unify the project’s visual direction. These documents established a single overarching visual concept, ensuring that content produced by multiple artists felt cohesive and as if it were created by one hand.
My Very SPECIAL thanks!
All of this wouldn’t be possible without Keen’s Great Team of incredibly talented and passionate Artists, Coders, Designers, Testers and many other talented people who contributed their time, skills and passion to make the end product looking as awesome as possible!
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