Far back as I can remember, Charming Wolf has been driving me crazy. He was the first of the men I had to make. And I’d never modeled a man before. I knew everything about him though. The muscle car he drove and the motorcycle. His dirty hands covered in motor oil,… I knew him right down to the wolf’s head belt buckle. We used him for tests. I personally had to remodel him twice and still don’t think I got him exactly right.
I don’t think it was the first time he and Ruby met at the playground either.
When creating the art style for The Path, we were influenced by several wonderful artists. We are trying to interview them all. Our interview with Lisa Falzon was published a while ago. And the interview with Ray Caesar was done in that same period. But we never got around to publishing it. What better moment than the first anniversary of The Path to share this very insightful and inspiring interview with one of the world’s most imaginative contemporary artists!
People think I paint pictures of children… I don’t! I paint pictures of the human soul… that alluring image of the hidden part of ourselves… some call them ghosts or spirits but I see them as the image of who we truly are, made manifest with all the objects and bruises that filled the story of each life.
I look at the game industry today and see only one game… it starts the same and ends the same and it’s sold in a variety of names and packages and has no mystery because it is not utilizing creativity as well as it could…
The Girl in Red Wolf is an even bigger mystery than The Girl in White when you meet her.
The Girl in White was the first model made for The Path prototypes. We couldn’t keep re-using the girl model from 8. The Girl in White of The Path is much older. I was perfectly ready for a re-design and asked the help of Ted Pendergraft. Here are a couple of his suggestions. But everything he gave seemed too much of a radical departure from the original girl. I think that if he could have worked with us longer we would have come to something great. But he had other work at the time which drew him away. I went back to my original concept for this character and started from scratch. We always wanted one of the wolves to be female, it just had to be. We liked the concept of there being twins in the game. (at one time we’d even thought of making Ginger and Rose be twins.) But then at some point, it felt good to split the Girl in White into her shadow self. And the girl most likely to be attracted would have to be Ginger. A girl stuck between child and teenager and a total Tomboy.
A switch in hairstyle & dress and The Girl in White becomes The Girl in Red Wolf. click to see them larger.
Now perhaps the Girl in White and the Girl in Red are aspects of each other. The Girl in White always trying to be helpful to those lost in the forest and Girl in Red is always playing tricks, her disappearing act, tripping Ginger up so she falls, etc. And all those birds that suddenly show in the field… Maybe the girls have encountered her before and that’s why they keep chasing the Raven away on The Path… they don’t want the Girl in Red Wolf around! Only Ginger wants to play with her, unlike her sisters this wolf likes rough games, she understands. Ginger doesn’t want to grow up and this wolf in red doesn’t either. They are 3 of a kind, all 13 years old, they are what is missing from each other’s lives. So Ginger wants to play…
… and who can blame her, she is the perfect playmate.
the overlay effect was originally just a manner to show which character is the focus of attention. it evolved, during beta testing into a way to show which character can interact with which object in the forest as well. We loved the look of double exposure from film photography and film:
looking at discolorations and glitches of photographic processes were a big influence as well as the false color effects done in movies to connect scenes to moods. i found the colors somehow give much more of a ‘horror’ atmosphere than darkness and grunge did.
the urns which appear on the living room table in Grandmother’s House after each girl successfully completes the game.
the raven that several of the girls chase on the path. and the wheelchair.
the nest is in the cemetary but the baby bird… have you seen it under the bed in the Children’s room? (when Ginger climbs under there.) I know it’s hard to see. I wish I’d had the skill to make the scenes under the bed more interesting. I wanted something to appear to be chasing you. But we didn’t get to do that.
and the knife. any girl can pick it up and it gives access to the Kitchen of Grandmothers house, where you see it again on the kitchen table. and which I’ve brought up before.
In the many versions of Little Red Ridinghood that inspired The Path we chose to ignore the ones where there is a Hunter, Woodsman or some such guy who comes and saves Red from the wolf. Instead we chose to make the Woodsman one of the wolves. The Path of Carmen is one of the more hotly argued chapters in our game because it seems to be the most obvious. Obviously we are evil people for depicting a situation where a girl meets a strange man in the woods… a man with an axe. A man who is more interested in obsessively chopping trees than he is in her. And what does she do, she drinks his beer and steals his hat sits by his fire like she owns the place.
The Woodsman is quiet and wants to be left alone in the forest to do what he does best, chop obsessively at trees that never fall. The Girl in White sometimes stops by to make sure he’s okay. Maybe they live in the forest as a family in seclusion?
I just think of him as being square as the cube he was extruded from. He’s not very tall, not really very assertive, And Carmen is waay too much for him to deal with that day.
first, a little music.
[audio:werewolf.mp3]
he’s a bit of a comical fellow. we wanted him and Robin to meet. Robin is the most traditional looking of all our Red Ridinghoods so she meets the most traditional looking “wolf.”
I actually had no problem at all coming up with a concept drawing for him. I sort of knew from the very beginning what I wanted him to be like. big, cuddly, goofy. But damn, those claws.
He sort of passively wanders around. Robin is more agressive than he is. As Robin sneaks up on him forgetting that though he may be “cuddly” he has thoughts and feelings and may not like having a girl ride him like an animal. He is only part animal, only at the full moon, the other part is human, afterall.
click to see it larger
Above, an in process render, the humble beginning of his model and one awesome rendering glitch 😉
These are what we call “reference sheets” and they were what I used to keep on track for the various environments and the effects the wolf has if he encounters the girl and “gets to Grandmother’s House first.” You can click to see a larger version.
The cemetary was one of the very first environments we made. It was featured in the demo we showed at the Independent Games Festival in 2008. We’d had a whole bunch of gravestones and grave monuments, including the angel statue, made by Dragonfly very early on (before we decided not to outsource modeling anymore.) But in the end it turned out we didn’t need them all. Many of these were thus reused in our other game, The Graveyard. We ended up reusing some of the graves I’d made for The Endless Forest too in The Path. Forests and cemeteries, we do that a lot. hmm.
In a few days. I’ll make a larger post about Grandmother’s House… It’s hard to explain a lot about what the Wolf effects on the house “mean” In a way because I don’t want to put too many concerete ideas about it out there. For another because sometimes scratches on a door are just scratches on a door. He digs holes in the ground. He rips apart the bed where Grandmother sleeps. A wolf will be a wolf will be a wolf.
footage from the very very first working prototype of game structure. re-using the girl in white model from 8. shows the way we work. we like to build the game as soon as possible to get a feel for things and then the real design work can begin.
muuuuuch later on. this was a prototype we built to examine character interaction. you can still see the first control interface in this one where characters are directed via buttons on screen. this also contains the experiment we did with a dance game. (i’m still sad we didn’t work that in to the final game somehow.)
there you have it. two ugly game prototypes. it’s all part of the process.
Well, really its just a set we’re uploading on Flickr. It contains treasured bits and pieces from our computers from the development of the game. Sketches, screenshots, little movies, whatever.
Part 2 of our ongoing postmortem is about the design of the game and some of the process we went through to get to what The Path became. The archive is the same story in images.
this has nothing to do with our game.
But Momus posted this song today on youtube.
and i like it.
and it’s called “My Rose”
and its seems very surreal and sad
and we have a character in The Path named Rose (that i think about whenever i hear the name Rose.)
and I listened to his music a lot when I was working on The Path
and…
This journal chronicles the making of The Path, a single player horror game developed by Tale of Tales, the game was released in March 2009 and can be downloaded via this website! Contributors to this journal are the game’s main creators Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn.
We hope you will enjoy our candid revelations about the work process. But we do want to warn you that if you truly want to experience The Path fresh, you might want to avoid reading these pages. We cannot garantee spoiler-free content!
I went back to my original concept for this character and started from scratch. We always wanted one of the wolves to be female, it just had to be. We liked the concept of there being twins in the game. (at one time we’d even thought of making Ginger and Rose be twins.) But then at some point, it felt good to split the Girl in White into her shadow self. And the girl most likely to be attracted would have to be Ginger. A girl stuck between child and teenager and a total Tomboy. 
