Development diary 7

Developing a protagonist is always difficult. You want to make sure that she is likable and relatable, while remaining cool or awesome.

for our game we went through a few iterations of our protagonist, moving from rebel, over nerdy, to girly, but we finally decided upon introverted. 

We wanted to create a character who was the embodiment of the experiences that she had been going through, experiences that the player would have to uncover through the course of the game.

We wanted her to seem like someone who would not call attention to herself, but someone who would be capable of amazing strength when it was called upon.

This is of cause allot to read into a couple of sketches, which is why our animator has his work cut out for him.

Development diary 6

What you see here is is actually a bit of a special piece of concept art. 

This is the last piece that was drawn while we were still planning for our game to be an FPS single player experience along the lines of amnesia or outlast.

To be fair, this piece was not the deciding factor, which changed our minds. what changed our minds were long and rather tiresome conversations between the core team about the kind of game we wanted to make.

We were all in agreement that the game should be an unique horror experience, but bringing that from our vague concepts to an actual playable demo, proved harder than we thought it was going to be. 

In the end we decided to scrap the idea of doing anything in 3D, as it would be too taxing for us as a team to create something we would be proud of in that medium. 

Rather, we chose to focus on a 2D adventure, something which we knew we would be able to execute… well, to be fair, that last point remains to be seen.

Development Diary 5

one of the things that we worked allot on was the design for our main character, We wanted her to seem vulnerable, but capable.

We had already decided that she was going be a young woman, but what kind of character she would be, was still up for grabs.

We started to look at characters from popular culture from which we might draw inspiration. we looked at heather from the third silent hill game, we re-watched Juno to look at Ellen Page’s Performance and we sat down and played “the last of us” to get a sense of Ashley Johnsons performance as Ellie. 

As Nice and fleshed out, as all of those characters are, we decided to go in a slightly different direction with our character. 

We wanted a girl who was less about the wisecracks and funny observations and more about the helplessness of being alone in the dark. 

We wanted a girl who was not a fighter, not a capable part of the world, not a strong woman, we wanted a scared little girl who was in way over her head.

With that in mind, we sat down and started to sketch out some character ideas, which is what you see above.