Finding the look

6 October 2026

The first proper walk through a generated ship looked like this, which, to be fair, is clean and flat and a bit like a hospital.

What I'm going for is a hopeful frontier with a used, industrial feel to it, where the world tells the story rather than a wall of text, and it had to read at a glance in a busy engine room while still looking nice in a screenshot. So I lined up nine different render styles side by side in the same rooms and ended up picking a hybrid I've been calling ink, which is cel-shaded bands of light, warm umber outlines and a bit of rim light on edges against the dark.

It really earns its keep where there's loads going on, like engineering with all the panels open:

Menus

Most of the UI lives in the world itself, so screens you lean in to, a tablet you hold up, tools that work like instruments, and the only flat screens are the pause menu and settings, which get my house style (I call it Workshop).

A name and a mark

And the name's settled now, it's Far Signal, with a logo that's a circuit drawn as an orbit.