VERTICAL SLICE
This week I focused some more on concepts for the main character of our game and the enemy they’ll face at the end of the game and see glimpses of throughout. I started by collecting references and inspiration on Pinterest, making dedicated boards for the detective character and the monster. We still didn’t have a solid grasp of what we wanted the detective to look like, so there’s no refining their concept through the board, just collecting references of anything I thought might be cool to incorporate into our character.
At this point we hadn’t come to the decision as a group what we wanted our character to be. A grizzled and experienced detective? Or a new one? A man? Or a woman? I just settled by gathering inspiration from everything and doing some more general concepts this week, and would ask the group to come to a decision during a group meeting we were planning to have on Friday.
Initially, my group wanted to go in a different direction with the monster in our game, but I thought differently. Since our game takes place in the woods, I thought it would be very cool for the main antagonist of the game to be some sort of forest god/deity, forgotten or fallen from grace, and using the missing person our character is searching from as some sort of vessel. When we were doing group work on Monday I suggested this to them, but thought I’d gather some inspiration and do some research and concepts to show them in the meantime before our meeting, so I could show them there and see if they liked it and wanted to go with this concept and add it to our narrative.
I made a Pinterest board for inspiration for my vision of our monster. I was very inspired by shadowy figures, deers, and an amalgamation of creatures with human faces. I also found this amazing artist on Artstation that captures the feeling I’d like to invoke with our monster.
In terms of concept art for out main character, I just created some general concepts and character exploration of different side profiles and genders.
During our meeting, I asked everyone’s opinions on what they liked/disliked of what I’ve shown and what direction would they want to bring it in, we’ve decided our character will be a man who’s been working as a detective for many years, and this was to be his last case before his retirement. I’m going to work over the next week to finalise a design and make a character sheet.
When I was making my monster concepts, I was incredibly inspired by the work of Oleg Vdovenko, a 2D and 3D artist from Russia, specifically his Forest God series of artworks. It’s obviously more extreme than I think we want to go with our monster, and I’m not exactly well versed in drawing a lot of gore and viscera, but it has the key scary concepts that I want to put in ours.
Like the animals that were once prey animals and skittish, now warped and mangled. Showing not much resemblance of their previous forms. I thought about this when I was making the concepts for our monster.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rA9lr2
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/48XNrk
I also researched a little into the symbolism of stags, since I wanted our monster to be some sort of forest god gone evil, I was excited when I found out that it was known in places colloquially as the King of the Forest, specifically by the Celts during the iron age.
https://amuraworld.com/en/topics/conservancy-report/articles/4818-red-deer-the-king-of-the-forest
Stags are also known to symbolise:
I thought this was very cool, as I think it would be so interesting for it to still symbolise those things, but a twisted, wrong version of it – like it symbolises regeneration, but only by the sheer will it has not to die, it stays alive, somehow.
When I started my concepts, I wanted to experiment with a few different looks but with a similar concept – which was the combination of deer and man. I briefly thought about adding a man’s face onto an entire stag’s body, which looks really cool, but it’s a bit too low-key for my tastes on what I want the monster to look like. Deciding on this, I decided to go in a more centaur-y direction. I wanted to have a crudely taxidermied creature – consisting of a mans upper half and a stag’s body, both bodies starting to rot and waste away but somehow staying alive. I played with a few different ideas for this and then showed my group during a meeting on Friday. They loved the designs and when asked what aspects they’d like to keep or discard, they favoured the version covered in bandages more.
I see it like the bandages are there to cover where antlers were attached to their head and to cover other crude disfigurations done to the upper half. Knowing my group members like the design of the monster I made, I’ll try and make a final character sheet by the end of next week.