The Seven Deadly Sins
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Last week I struggled with design decisions made about the enemies and how I would execute them. Even though I still have my doubts about it, this week provided me with some new insights and inspirations on how to approach the enemy design.
I started this week with doing more research about the seven deadly sins. Despite my earlier protest, the enemies being the seven deadly sins was not going to change. I was lost about how to make them recognizable while keeping them relatively abstract. I ended up doing quite a bit of research about the seven deadly sins and found that they are associated with certain colours and certain animals. Although there are some discrepancies among sources, generally the seven deadly sins are associated with the following combinations of colours and animals: Pride – Horse, Lion and Peacock – Violet Envy – Dog – Green Lust – Cow and Snake – Blue Greed – Frog – Yellow Gluttony – Pig – Orange Wrath – Bear – Red Sloth – Goat – Light Blue Some of these sins have more than one animal associated with it and that meant choices had to be made. Since these sins are reflected in the game as souls, I already had some ideas for their design. They would consist of mostly circular bodies surrounded with spiritual flames. For the design of the sins that would mean I had to work with simple but recognizable characteristics of these animals. I decided to mainly work with ears, eyes, hair and tails. I would then incorporate these characteristic elements into the circular design and the spiritual flames. I made some simple and quick sketches based on the animals representing the seven sins. For most of them I had found a design that I really enjoyed and I felt were recognizable enough as the animal. Pride and Lust had the problem of having more than one animal associated with their deadly sin. I ended up drawing both the cow and the snake for Lust. The cow was hard to make recognizable and I did not enjoy the look of it. Although it fit better with the recurring theme of the circular bodies, the snake was cleaner and easier to recognize.
For Pride, I had three options to choose from. The peacock would have been an obvious choice but I felt as if it did not match the other designs I had made and thus I decided to go for either the horse or the lion. The lion would have had a large flaming mane but that was about the only thing distinguishable about it and it seemed to be swallowing the rest of the design. I ended up picking the design of the horse, which has a flaming mane, distinguishable ears and eyes that are easier to recognize. Wrath gave me some problems when the game designer did not like my original idea. I admit that the claw did not fit the theme I was going for but I failed at making a good looking bear that fit in with the rest. Wrath is thus probably the weakest in my line-up.
Although many of these colours and animals will not remind people of the seven deadly sins as they are quite far-fetched and not very well known. There are still some remnants of the seven deadly sins in our daily lives. The idioms ‘seeing red’, ‘proud as a peacock’ or ’green with envy’ originate from the deadly sins. Despite the unrenownedness of the animal representations of the seven deadly sins, I did feel like I managed to portray them in a way the team wanted. The seven deadly sins will now be chased down by the Satan Piñata.
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