Feasibility Testing
We’re starting down the long road that will end with something hopefully wonderful, but every project has to start somewhere and this is that start
Beginning
It is important to us that this story be told equal parts textually and visually. As such, we’ve been working primarily in this beginning stage on developing a cohesive visual aesthetic. Our story is character-driven, thus we are beginning the visual development process with character design, and letting that lead the rest of the design process.
So…What is it?
We are working on a game-like interactive storytelling experience centered around disability and magic we are tentatively calling Ward 7. We were already interested in telling a story about disability since it is relevant in our personal lives, but in diving deeper into media in search of precedent, we found there to be a lack of positive or holistic portrayals of disability in media. Our project will be completely digital, with our final product being an interactive game-like storytelling experience.
Character Design
The Size of our Cast
The first thing we decided was how many characters we wanted to focus on. While this in theory is fairly simple, because each character has their own environments, and pieces of the story that should be able to fluctuate as the player moves through the story, it also becomes a calculation of how many characters do you need to make a world feel full without overwhelming yourself with a town of people to design. We referenced the narrative inspirations for the project: Haunting of Hill House, Umbrella Academy, and Stranger Things,and settled preliminarily on 5. This number allows for interesting almost family-like dynamics that are hard to get out of a smaller cast, and creates a wide enough cast to represent varying stories without overwhelming ourselves with writing. It’s also worth noting that though the cast is composed of five “main characters,” there is still a hierarchy of importance with the characters in the same way that there are five members of the nerdy gang in Stranger Things, but Eleven and Will lead a lot of the narrative.
Character Archetypes
From there we were suddenly faced with the truly infinite scope of how many directions we could take these characters in. Narrowing down the possibilities for who these characters could be was essential for moving forward, so we started looking into character archetypes as an inspiration and constraint. There are many lists and sets of character archetypes to be found on the internet, but we decided on the 12 Character Archetypes, in particular: The Explorer, The Creator, The Innocent, The Magician, and The Rebel.
Naming
After we had picked a set of character archetypes to work from, we began researching names. This may seem a bit preemptive, but we found it difficult to truly understand these characters-- who at this stage were only loose archetypes--without knowing their names. It’s important that these characters come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and that those were decided early on so that they could influence the character designs in a meaningful way, rather than being a haphazard last minute decision. When we had decided on the ethnicities of all the characters, we used that to guide our search for names. Some names were picked quickly based on purely on meaning—the name Marlowe meaning driftwood instantly stood out as the perfect name for “the explorer”. Other’s became a research project into naming conventions in different countries—this was the case with Indra, as Malaysian children are often given two names, one that as a more unique identifier, and a second which is a more common name pulled from major historical or religious figures. Finalizing each name came down to balancing interesting name meanings with names that flowed phonetically, both individually and when a part of a group. Once names were decided, we then assigned ages to each of the characters based on their archetypes and potential role in the narrative. We wanted the ages to stay between ten and eighteen so that there would be some variation in maturity and size without creating such a large age gap to where it would feel unreasonable for these characters to be interacting with one another.
Moodboarding!
With the logistics of character creation complete, we finally began moodboarding. Moodboards are something we heavily rely on throughout the design process, and so it was important that they were organized so we could repeatedly reference them throughout the project. We began by doing a deep dive on Pinterest, downloading hundreds of images pulled from personal boards ad searches of relevant subjects. With all of these images compiled into a bloated folder, we sorted them into categories, and then further filtered them to create a unified aesthetic.
The hardest part of the research process by far was finding reference for the characters. Having reference of a real person when designing a character is crucial, because it allows you to ground your designs in reality and know what a character would look like from multiple angles and making different expressions. Typically an actor is an ideal reference for a character because there’s a wide collection of available images, but because our characters are children, finding a diverse collection of references was much more challenging. We ended up leaning heavily on professional and Instagram child models for reference, and there are still a handful of characters who we could not find one unified reference for, but instead have a collection of different references to pull one or two features from in order to compile a single character.
Disability Research
The cast is composed of characters who are disabled and chronically ill, and it was important that we know these characters as people before we knew them based on their disabilities. In reality no one gets to cherry pick their disability, but since the disabilities in this story are tied to the character’s supernatural abilities, we needed to pick illnesses that provided good jumping off points for thinking about story elements. One of our technical experts suggested that rather than trying to find the illness that was just right for each character, we should instead create a placeholder illness with symptoms that would be most relevant or interesting. We moved forward with this tactic, and found it a useful in that it allowed us to tailor the illnesses to the character, while worrying somewhat less about perfectly representing a single illness. We still intend to research the illnesses we are pulling inspiration from very thoroughly, and reach out to individuals living with these illnesses about what they think it’s important to see represented, and what we need to avoid.
3D Models
The characters and setting of our game are going to be all hand-drawn, but when you’re creating assets at a fairly quick pace, it’s incredibly helpful to have some basic models to reference for proportions and poses. These are modified versions of the basic models in Clip Studio Paint that we used to create dynamic poses for our cast page and to help with understanding our character’s sizes in relation to one another.
Character Moodboards
Once we had a somewhat clear vision of who these characters are, it was important to make boards for each character individually so that we could get a more complete idea of how we were going to tackle their design. This means collecting not only references for what their faces may look like, but also what they may wear, how they might move, and what colors, textures, and patterns may quickly describe their personality.
Mood boarding: Style Edition
Just as it’s important to have references for what the characters or setting should look like, it’s also important to have references of what the overall style of art should be. Ultimately a style guide is something that we’ll develop ourselves, but in the early stages, it’s good to look at other visual styles that inspire our own so that we can understand what we do and don’t like about them to help with the creation of a strong unified art style.
Shapes!
With all of this research under our belts, it’s finally time to start drawing! We were careful not to dive in too quickly with details though, and instead, start with larger forms that we can then chisel away at to uncover the character design. This means beginning with large ambiguous shapes that vaguely capture the “vibe” of the character, and then challenging ourselves to interpret those shapes into a workable character design. This process is slower than jumping straight in with character anatomy, but it also helps us be less precious with our designs so that we’re able to step back and more analytically look at what about a basic design may or may not work in its beginning stages.
Silhouettes
With these broad shapes down, we’re then able to pick out elements that we think are compelling and put together a design that makes sense for who the character is. We started by scanning in the hand-drawn shapes and blocking them out in procreate. Once we had our favorite shapes blocked in, we drew over them to figure out basic forms like the torso, head, legs, and arms. Depending on how strong the initial shape is, this process can be incredibly fast or it can be a long back and forth trying to sort out where a person fits into this shape. Either way, there’s a lot of turning the canvas every which way to see how our designs hold up to scrutiny and then shifting things accordingly. The end product is a rough silhouette of the character that we can then work with.
Getting the Details
Doing this process digitally makes working out the details a lot easier than it may be otherwise. We always begin by blocking in the entire shape of the character silhouette, and then utilizing our sketches and some clipping masks, we’re were able to add in values that help define the character better.
The Nitty Gritty
Roughly speaking, we have split this project into two spheres of work which we can execute independently within our skill sets. Calvin will be doing almost all of the asset creation and visual work while Dani will be taking these assets and implementing them into a playable product.
For Implementation…
For implementation and assembly into our gamelike experience, we’ll be using Unity as we already have a decent basis for working with it, and since it is fairly industry standard, we know several people who can help and there is excellent documentation available online.
For Assets…
For the asset creation aspect of this project we will primarily be using Procreate for illustration and frame by frame animation. To a lesser degree, we may also use Adobe Illustrator or Adobe After Effects for quick vector assets and any motion design. Together we have a very strong proficiency in all of these programs and skills.
Bringing the Experience to Life
We took some time this week to implement a rough prototype in Unity of some of the mechanics we’re interested in using. So far, we’ve described our project as gamelike rather than a game unto itself because we’re more interested in purely telling a story than embedding a story into an action or puzzle-style game. In addition, since our story is very character and environment-driven, we imagine there will be a lot of dialogue perhaps similar to that of a visual novel. As such, the primary thing we wanted to prototype in this stage is the basis of a dialogue system.
We glanced through some tutorials and found that Unity is not particularly built to have a dynamic dialogue system without a lot of customization. What we did find, however, was that Ink (a popular choice-based text adventure scripting language) has a plugin that integrates very easily into Unity. We’ve also chatted with people who worked in Unity on major projects in the past who have actually used this plugin (!) and they confirmed that this integration was easy to use and very robust, so this is super exciting because it takes a lot of the stress out of creating a dialogue system from scratch (though we can and likely still well implement text parsing to a lesser degree).
