Bonus Content Disc/Technology: Normandy - 3rd Floor

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Technology of Mass Effect: Normandy - 3rd Floor" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

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Derek Watts: So, some concepts we spent a lot of time on. We do full color studies, we paint them all up in Photoshop... A lot of the stuff, especially for levels, are just drawn up quickly on pieces of paper. There's so much to try and concept up in the levels; it's just too much to do all of them in Photoshop and do them really well. Level artists do the best job they can, they have a lot of freedom as artists in the game. Character artists are usually more constrained by the concepts. Level artists do a few drawings of the areas. The rest of it they have to make up on their own, by working with the textures and the color from the original production painting. So, this is just a quick drawing done up of what a door might look like in the Normandy. Just drawn up on a piece of paper, given to the level artist, they build it, and then usually we just scan these in or even put them in a pile afterwards.

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Derek Watts: This looks like a concept for the engine room in the Normandy. We wanted a nice big power source for this ship. So, you'd come on the platforms off to the right, you'd walk down, and then that console area is with the engine behind it. And then in the lower drawing, it looks like he's built what the engine might look like, this long shaft with these spinning blades.

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Derek Watts: This is another concept of the console, and then the engine would go off behind it. We simplified this up a bit, just had this rotating kind of shell with this energy effect that went down.

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Derek Watts: That's another concept of the engine room. You can see those blades in the lower left, in the middle; we actually used those in the final engine room, we textured those up, and those were spinning around, almost like a jet engine, the intakes.

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Derek Watts: And another concept of the engine room. This isn't much different than the other one, but you're starting to get the garage is up on the right. That's where the vehicle would park.

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Derek Watts: So, this looks like kind of a floor plan of what the garage is, and then you can see in the lower right where the vehicle would exit. At this point, we were probably thinking maybe the Normandy lands right on the ground. The vehicle would drive right out the back, and you'd be able to drive in. We were even thinking we would have multiple vehicles at this time, you could pick and choose which one you wanted to drive or explore the world with. We eventually just had to go with one because we were running out of time, and it was already getting complicated enough. So, we turned that door in the back into a big kind of drop door. Instead of having the Normandy land on the ground, we would just launch the rover out, and you would land on rockets. This saved us an endless amount of work, it was a really good idea to do that.

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Derek Watts: So, this is a top-down view of the bottom of the hangar. It looks like they have the tank model in there at this point. Eventually, we just put the rover in there. And then the top view is kind of how it would look in some of the elevation drawings.

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Derek Watts: This is a detail of how some of the walls would look in the hangar. So, this was going to be a fairly dark area. We ended up putting a structure more in the middle with a kind of bracing that went up to the ceiling, colored a bit of red down there just to give it a different look to know which floor you were on, and then just plunked the rover in there, and that was it. Built a large door that we have opening in a cutscene.

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Derek Watts: Again, another study of how the walls might look in the garage.