Terror of the Deep

Hello everyone, it’s blogging day again.

Today I’ll be talking about something different from my usual blog posts. Previously I’ve walked through my process of animating different sprites as well as explaining some different animation theories that I like to refer to while working. This week I’ve mainly worked with finishing up last week’s set of animations, creating background objects for decoration in our game’s stages, and the design of our fish’s final stage of growth. I’ve chosen to reflect on my character design.

We decided in the early days of the project that our player fish would have three different designs to represent its stages of growth. The general plan was that as our player fish grew in size, it would travel deeper into the sea and meet bigger and more dangerous fish. Our lead designer came up with the idea that as the fish grows, it’ll go through a change similar to the environment and become monstrous and consumed by gluttony.

I threw together three quick concept sketches at this point which we’ve been using since as general guides for the aesthetic feel of our three stages of growth.

While these three images illustrate the general shift in mood, the designs were very much just early scribbles. Similarly, I also threw together some concept sketches at the same time that illustrated how our fish would change as it grew in size:

For these sketches I mostly just wanted to get a feel for altering a design’s physique and proportions while keeping consistency throughout the evolution chain. The ideas I had in mind was that as the fish grows, its mouth will get bigger, and its eyes will get smaller. The increase in the size of its mouth would bring out the monstrous and gluttonous characteristics our lead designer wanted in the fish’s evolution. The decrease in eye size would both demonstrate the change in size in the fish’s evolution, as well as gradually making it seem like the fish is losing its humanity, as characters with bigger eyes tend to come off as child-like and innocent.

Now, our first two stages of growth have been finalized and fully animated, and it’s time to design our fish’s last form, the monstrous third stage.

I had a number of ideas in mind for the final form. In the original concept for the game, the player fish was an oarfish who had replaced her angler with a fishing rod and a light bulb instead. While the fish I’ve been drawing as our player character isn’t based on any actual fish, I wanted its final evolution to have some characteristics of an anglerfish, since we’ve kept the idea of the lamp fishing rod which is used in practically the same way that an anglerfish uses its light. Anglerfish are also quite commonly-known fish that live in the deep sea and have monstrous appearances.

While sketching for the design I started out just quickly drawing some simplified anglerfish to get a feel for their anatomy. After that, I tried to nail down the general body shape our fish’s third form would have. I wanted the back of the fish’s body to be higher than the front, both to suggest weight and size in the fish’s front and mouth, and because I’d altered the fish’s second form body similarly and I wanted to keep a consistency in the evolution of the fish. On the right side of the image, you can see little circles I sketched out that represent the fish’s different stages and how the body shape would be altered.

I took some time deciding how I would want the mouth. Having the fish keep its mouth closed, or at least partially closed, would be consistent with its previous forms, but that would look quite messy with the sharp teeth I was now planning on giving it. In the end, I decided to go with an open mouth, even if I would’ve liked more consistency in the transition, because an open mouth would give a clearer silhouette of the fish, and would again support the fish’s now monstrous characteristic.

Here’s my final sketch I decided to go with:

Our fish now has the general anatomy of an anglerfish, it’s hunched over with the back going upwards, it has a huge mouth with numerous sharp teeth and a “tongue” to guide food into its stomach. As the quick doodle in the corner demonstrates, it can now open its jaw ridiculously wide to swallow prey, another trait of the anglerfish.

To give off a grotesque feel, I’ve made the fins tattered and frayed, and I’ve added traits that make it look a bit fleshy and gross. The skin at the end of its mouth is partially melted together on the top and bottom, as suggested by the lines I’ve added. The fishing rod has also now become one with the fish’s body, fusing together at the back of its body. Its eyes are also now completely soulless, with big dark circles around its eyes and very clear wrinkles.

It was challenging keeping this design consistent with the previous ones. It’s been very difficult balancing the amount of details needed to convey monstrosity with the general simplicity in the art style and the previous forms. I’ve made many adjustments to it, and I’m quite happy with it as a design, but I still think it might be too detailed in comparison to the fish’s other stages of growth. It might need some additional adjustments before the design is finalized.

In any case, I decided to go ahead and also do a color test. From the beginning I planned the color progression in our fish’s evolution to go from warm, bright and strong colors to darker, colder and more desaturated ones. In the fish’s previous evolutions it went from a vibrant yellow to a slightly muddier green, so I wanted to follow that progression of colors.

It was… Difficult.

The ocean at this point in the game will be nearly pitch black, so I wouldn’t have too much to worry about regarding contrasting with the background, but working with darker desaturated colors certainly is not my strong point. At first, I colored the fish various shades of desaturated blue, but I found it far too dull. Now, I’ve gone with a desaturated cyan for the main body, as it goes along with the color progression of the fish and desaturated greens in general tend to look quite dirty, which goes with the grotesque theme.

I initially went with blue, then purple for the fins. But in the end I think I’ve settled with this desaturated pinkish red. Giving the fish a more varied palette makes it stand out better, and green and red are complementary colors which fit together nicely.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this color palette, but I feel a bit trapped regarding my choices. I think I would’ve liked to make this last form a dirty red, which is again a callback to anglerfish. The problem is that I already made the fish go from yellow to green between its first two stages, and I feel that doubling back and going to red would feel too inconsistent.

I would like to work on this palette some more and adjust it until I feel I’ve got something better. I’m considering going back and slightly altering the second stage’s color palette to make it flow better into this stage, but I don’t want to go back and change the entire color progression of the fish’s evolution. I’m satisfied with how I prepared for the fish’s physical changes in my concept sketches, but I should’ve thought more about the palette from the start, and made mockup palettes before even finalizing the first form’s design. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess.