We took a short vacation but now we’re back. Putting the final touches on the first sister we will be unveiling from the game quite soon! 😮
While working, I’ve been listening a lot to Mothertounge by contemporary composer Nico Muhly. There are three versions of a folk song on the album with lyrics I feel earn the label of “horror song”. Thus very inspiring for what I’m doing right now:
There were two sisters walking down by a stream
Oh the wind and the rain
The older one pushed the younger one in
Oh the dreadful wind and rain
Pushed her in the river to drown
Oh the wind and the rain
Watched her as she floated on down
Oh the dreadful wind and rain
Floated on down to the old mill pond
Oh the wind and the rain
She floated on down to the old mill pond
Oh the dreadful wind and rain
The miller fished her out with his long long hook
Oh the wind and the rain
And he brought this maid in from the brook
Oh the dreadful wind and rain
Made a fiddle bow from her long yellow hair
Oh the wind and the rain
He made a fiddle bow from her long yellow hair
Oh the dreadful wind and rain
Made fiddle picks from her long finger bones
Oh the wind and the rain
He made fiddle picks from her long finger bones
Oh the dreadful wind and rain
Made a fiddle bridge from her own nose bridge
Oh the wind and the rain
Made a fiddle bridge from her own nose bridge
Cried oh the dreadful wind and rain
And he made a fiddle from her own breast bone
Oh the wind and the rain
The sound could melt a heart of stone
Oh the dreadful wind and rain
The only tune that fddle would play
Oh the wind and the rain
The only tune that fiddle would play
oh the dreadful wind and rain
And the only tune that fiddle could play
Oh the wind and the rain
The only tune that fiddle would play
Was Oh the dreadful wind and rain.
heres what it sounds like:
[audio:theonlytune.mp3]
creepy but catchy, eh 😉
Read around online and found that this macabre song is traditionally meant to be sung to children. I got curious about the lyrics and, as with most folk songs, there are a million versions of it. Each with a slightly different title, with variations on the theme. But this is what is so fascinating about them! Just passing it on. If you like it i’d suggest giving the entire album a listen. Its very good stuff.
Now that all the characters are completed, I’ve switched gears and am concentrating on refining the Forest environments. Looking through my folder of inspirations and reference material I come again and again back to this man’s work. Eyvind Earle was perhaps most famous for art directing and painting the backgrounds for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. I’ve admired the style of that film my whole life.
We decided from the beginning to not try to create anything realistic looking. No photographic bark and leaf textures. In fact in The Path we are using gothic ornaments and its funny how this still gives the feeling of leaves. While I don’t try to copy what this guy has done, very modern, very 1950s, I do get into the way his orderly patterning looks. At the same time, I like the chaos of a forest with branches jutting out randomly, creating spooky silhouettes. We want players to be reminded that a forest is a wild unknowable place constantly changing. I think the atmosphere we are creating shares Earle’s use of the stark blackness of the trees, punctuated by shocking colors.
All 14 characters have been modelled and are at the rigger’s to get their skeleton fitted in, and then we’ll give them skin. This is quite a monumental milestone for us because it’s been an extremely tedious and long winded process to get all those characters modelled. Especially because we were hoping to hire a professional expert for this job but all the people we tested with disappointed in one way or another. It would appear to be impossible to find somebody who combines technical skills with an artistic style that matches our work.
We really had not scheduled any time for Auriea to model all these characters but she ended up doing it anyway. And they look great! 🙂
I get a kick out of the unfinished; The unexpected beauty of glitches, the aesthetic quality of things one never sees in a finished game. In this case, its the glowing bones from the girl’s rigs that caught my eye. This odd sort of photography takes place often while I work. So, occaisionally I will post things like this. Celebrating my techno-fetishism. Roaming that Uncanny Valley forever.
We’re in the middle of production now. The focus is on asset creation and implementation. And we’re expanding the game as elements get added. Auriea and I are working fulltime on the game. Up till last week, Auriea’s focus has been on modelling the characters (there’s 14 of those: 6 Reds, 6 wolves, the grandmother and the Girl in White). Most of that work is done now. And now her attention is going towards fleshing out the environment of the interior of Grandmother’s House for which I have made placeholder geometry and in-game system over the past few months. Next to that I’m also implementing the endless stream of animations that Laura is producing. Many of which require new behaviours or parameters to be added to the Drama Princess parts of the game engine.
Laura is also working full time on The Path these months. There’s a lot of animation in the game! Luckily we have found a great help in Hans for finetuning the skinning of the characters. So Laura can concentrate on what she does best.
Jarboe and Kris have just started with the creation of the musical compositions for the five remaining Wolves, and some other songs. We’re looking forward to hearing more. As we have experienced during the development of the Alpha Demo, hearing the music in the game is incredibly important for making decisions about aesthetics and even about gameplay.
The production of assets will continue until the end of July for all our collaborators and the end of August for Auriea and I. Then everything should be in the game: 3D models, sounds, textures, animations, software systems, character behaviours, etcetera. Everything should work but does not need to be finalized yet. That’s what will happen in September, October and part of November: a phase Auriea and I call “Authoring” and a vital part of the way in which we create games. That’s when we make final decisions on interactions and the look and feel of the game. We’ll probably do some user-testing in this period too. After that, we’re going to do another two months of “Finalizing“, which includes bug fixing and creating installers. I think we’ll also contact the publishers and distributors that have shown interest in the past during that period to see if we can come to an arrangement.
In February the game should be done. But we may not be ready to release it just yet. That will depend in part on any partners we decide to collaborate with and, more importantly, on the marketing that we want to do. We want to create nice marketing materials (stills and a trailer) and may be worth postponing the launch so we can do it properly. (it will be hard, though, because we’re very eager to show our work to the world)
