Harpoon
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Welcome to my blog. My name is Linn and I am one of the artists in team Wendigo. Team Wendigo is a team of 5 people; one manager, one programmer, one designer and two artists. The game that we have chosen to develop is called Umibozu and is about a Japanese fisherman who hears a tale about the mysterious Umibozu and decides he is going to try to find it. Umibozu is a Japanese myth of a dark, humanoid shape out at sea. The game is supposed to convey the feeling of mystery and adventure. The fisherman goes on this quest to find a mystery in his fishing boat, alone on a foggy sea, with only a harpoon and a flashlight to ward of enemies and rocks. Sometimes he finds crates with power ups to help him survive the journey. The first asset that I am making for the project is a harpoon. I started by researching harpoons of the specific time that we have chosen for our game. The game is to take place in 19th century japan. It was hard to find images of harpoons from that time. Most of the information was from earlier times or of to modern harpoons. I found some reading about English whalers that were from that time. It was a bit vague but at least I found out that mid-19th century a Norwegian whaler invented the steam boat and a new technique for the harpoon. He invented a projectile where the hooks are folded along the shaft. On impact there is an explosion and the hooks are extended within the whale. The projectile is then stuck in the whale and the explosion also helps kill the whale quicker. Later they made it so that the explosion pushed air into the whale, keeping it from sinking. The caonon was fairly easy to draw. It only took 2 hours. The projectile was harder. I couldn’t figure out how to make the harpoons with the hooks folded. I made a few sketshes but couldn’t make it look the way I wanted. I finally decided to just make a classic, old fashioned harpoon.
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