Project Atius Update #5 Interview with Mariel Thompson

Welcome back to the Project Atius development blog. Today I’m going to be talking to our art lead about how she game up with the overall artistic direction of Project Atius.

So, what was the first inspiration for Wisdom’s cave?

The environments of Thomas Scholes. His work has such an ethereal quality to it, which lends itself so well to a game about adventuring through other worlds of ritual and magic. 

 Cool, so how did you come up with the color palette for the level? It’s very visually striking.

The color palette was born from two sources. The first being a desire to represent natural forms like trees (specifically their bark) without making the environment overwhelmingly brown. The second source was the theme of Wisdom herself; slow, stable and steady like the natural world around us, but stressed from conflict and a contradiction of nature. This led to the neon yellows and greens and their variations.

 

What’s the specific inspiration for wisdom? She has a pretty unique look to her.

Wisdom’s design has changed quite a bit since her original conception. Wisdom is thematically represented by elegantly distorted nature, and her original direction was very ghastly. She was based on the kandra in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. In the Mistborn universe, members of the kandra species construct their bodies by forming translucent layers of muscle over found or crafted objects (like bones) to form a unique skeletal structure. Her first pass of designs ended up looking too much like the traditional skeletal warrior in fantasy genre, but I still wanted to keep the Mistborn inspiration. For Wisdom’s second design, I gave her a body built of multiple organic materials, as well as a nature that encourages her to seek out and gather up great deals of information before acting on anything.

Ok, last question. How did the changes to Wisdom effect the look of the environment?

Wisdom’s environment is a direct reflection of herself. You could almost compare it to the human body; the environment is alive and an extension of Wisdom’s own body. So her physical and mental health can be interpreted through her cavernous home. When Wisdom was more skeletal, this meant petrified organic life. Now that she is more influenced by nature, her cave is full of distorted plant life, especially ocean forms like coral, cooled lava, and deep sea vents, as they are forms that shouldn’t exist above the water. Water itself in Wisdom’s cave is best described as radioactive goo.

So there you have it, thanks a lot Mariel for taking time out of you day to answer some questions for me. Next post I’ll be talking to our lead writer about the world that Project Atius takes place in.

Cheers,

Robert

Project Atius Quick Update 1

Welcome back! Today we are going to be doing a concept art round-up. We have a lot of concepts and odds and ends coming in right now so I thought this would be a good opportunity to show them off a bit. I’m going to be doing quick updates like this in between interview with the team so you all can get a better grasp on how the game is shaping up.

Starting us off is some concepts for architectural details that will be added to the natural stone wall of Wisdom’s cave

This is a concept of part of the level, for this one I’ll let the artist Catherine Harman explain it. “The cuts in the ground are supposed to be for the ooze to leak out into the cavern (what I imagined was originally water to nurture the trees that are now petrified). The symbols on the ground are the Celtic runes for wisdom.”

Next up we have Wisdom’s old meditation room, an area of extra story content if the player manages to find it.

Lastly we have some rocks, which are pretty much what is says on the tin.

Thanks again for checking back with our development blog. As promised the next proper update will be with our lead artist Mariel Thompson. After that we are gonna sit down and talk with the lead writer on the team Zach Bogucki about the larger world that Project Atius takes place in. Stay tuned for that and more.

Cheers,

Robert

Project Atius Update #4

Welcome back to the Project Atius development blog! This time I’m going to be talking about the level design in the dungeon leading up to your final confrontation with the mad god Wisdom.

Now I’m going to hand the keyboard over to one of our level designers Hayley.

Hello, Hello. I am Hayley and I am one of the Level Designers working on Project Atius. We decided, as a group to go back to the original design and tweak it for the scope of the ten weeks we are provided for this project. The original design was created with the intent for the player to encounter enemies, which had to be cut due to the lack of time, riggers and animators.

The team of designers collaborated and modified the design so the player will only interact with the environment, which will teach the player the mechanics necessary to defeat the boss. The design challenge is to keep the player engaged with the gameplay and keeping the player entertained as they move through the level.

Here is the final map, thanks a bunch to Hayley for taking the time to explain the evolution of our level. Come back next time where I will be talking to our art lead, Mariel Thompson to talk about the aesthetic direction of Project Atius.

Cheers,

Robert

Project Atius Update #3

Welcome to the third update of the Project Atius development blog. Today I’m going to be talking at length about the pivotal moment of the game. The final boss fight against Wisdom. Before we get into that however, let’s learn a little bit about Wisdom and the world she comes from.

Wisdom, as her name suggest is the goddess of wisdom. Before the conflict of the gods she was a font of peace and tranquility given to meditation and deep introspection. People would come to her to seek advice in times of trouble or simply to meditate within her cave. However, as the world changed around her and she was unable to keep up and slowly but surely her inability to react quickly to a very important problem drove her insane, turning her into the creature we see today.

Now, tucked away in her cave Wisdom rages in solitude, a once respected and worshiped god reduced to madness by none other than herself.

(Work in progress)

Now that we know a little bit more about the primary antagonist in Project Atius, lets get down to how the fight with Wisdom will go down and some of the things you have to look out for during the fight. The most important thing to remember during the fight is that you are in Wisdom’s domain, which means she has complete control over the environment. Another thing to keep in mind is that Wisdom is much faster than than you and will use this to her up most advantage.  Aside from that, she has a host of abilities that are designed to lift the player into the toxic gas that fills the top of the room, or to give her time to heal after taking damage. In order to defeat Wisdom, the player should make use of the skills they learned in the dungeon. The intent for Wisdom was to make her nearly impossible to defeat while she has the full space to dart around. However, the player learns that they are able to destroy the moving platforms in the dungeon. If they use this acquired knowledge, gaps will be made that Wisdom is unable to cross. This will hinder her movement and make Wisdom much easier to hit with magic. Physical attacks are even more effective against Wisdom, but are much more difficult to land since getting close to Wisdom is not only difficult, but dangerous as well. While destroying the environment may benefit the player, it can also hurt them. By destroying the platforms, the player limits Wisdom’s movement, but they also limit their own. The player will then be able to fall down the hole they created by destroying the platform. This encourages the player to be strategic about which platforms to destroy.

Thanks for coming back to see how far we’ve come, and be sure to keep coming back. Next week I will have an in depth explination of the level and puzzle designed used in the level before getting to the final boss.

Cheers,

Robert

Project Atius Update #2

Hello and welcome to the second post for Project Atius. We have been working very hard and we are very excited to show you a brief video that shows some of the mechanics used in the boss fight against Wisdom.

Aside from that we got Shader Forge, which our art team is very excited to use. Here is an example of it being used on our boss mob.

To go along with that we have the finished sculpt for the pillars, which are a large part of the final encounter.

We also have some more finished concept art.

This is the finished concept for the sword, the blade of atius.

Here we have a concept for the bridge leading to Wisdom.

Lastly here is a mock-up of the start screen.

Stay tuned for more updates, next time I’ll be going in-depth with the boss fight mechanics and how we came up with the overall design of the fight with Wisdom.

Cheers,

Robert

Project Atius Update #1

Hello and welcome to the Atius development blog. On this blog I will be chronicling the development of Project Atius from conception to completion. Right now we are in week two of development, thus all I have to show you today is concept art, and a finished model of our boss creature Wisdom.

First off here are some of our concept art for the cave the game takes place in.

This is the concept art we have for our final boss Wisdom.

Lastly this is our finished model for Wisdom.  Look forward to some videos, a run through of our black box, and some in progress shots of our player character next post.

Cheers,

Robert