And here at last, the last of the wolves. The Cloud Wolf appears, like the weather. He doesn’t mean to hurt anyone, he just is. He is beautiful like a thunderstorm. You can only sit back and admire the destruction he causes.
So indeed in his making I had strong ideas about him. But damn if I can explain anything underlying his part in the game in words.
If I had to pick a ‘favorite’ wolf of my own, it must be the Cloud Wolf. Beyond all words. Every time I see the scene with Rose on the lake tears come to my eyes.
No I don’t know who he is. No one does, least of all her, or me. She aspires to know. She loves. Because pure love is all Rose knows.
[audio:tippysdemise.mp3]
and some music to take us out.
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.
They are not the same girl. Or are they?
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.
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.
