General Ship Design
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The avatar of Aetherial is a ship, as was decided in the concept document. I, however, decided to redesign it somewhat, as the original design was perhaps not the most logical. It was very beautiful, but it didn’t really have sails per se, it was more like it had wings. I also knew that I would have to animate it, and animating a character that I had no idea how to draw seemed hard to do as my first attempt at animating. As such, I, made the (in hindsight, perhaps unnecessary) choice to redesign the ship.
At first I made the initial sketch of ship no 1, which was largely inspired by the original ship design by team Vampire combined with the idea of having a squid involved. This was because of the antagonist of the game being compared to Moby Dick – a sperm whale – whose main diet consists of giant squids. The design, whilst fun, looked more like the ship of a smuggler than that of the champions of an entire planet. The actual squid also posed some problems – would it move, and if so how? Did it assist or hinder the ship? It all got a bit too complicated and so I made some more drawings.
I collected a lot of images of various fast-looking sailboats, since the ship is supposed to be fast and graceful. From these reference pictures I the started to sketch out some general boat shapes in order to get a feel for the actual space of the hull and the way the sails were fastened and how they functioned. I then continued by adding other features more fit for air crafts, like massive sail keels and zeppelin-style balloons. I had an idea that the ship would be drawn in a style inspired by art nouveau, since it’s such a graceful art movement, which I quickly discovered was harder than expected. My own art style isn’t particularly similar to art nouveau and suddenly learning the most important guidelines of an entire art movement just for some ship designs was perhaps a little hard. The general shapes and patterns are however, still definitely inspired by art nouveau. From the five designs I presented to my group, no 3 was chosen, because it looked the fastest. The general consensus was also that a zeppelin-style boat was better than a proper sailboat since it was more logical to have a flying zeppelin than a sailboat. However, during the sprint review that week, our QA for art expressed the feeling that all of the ship concepts were rather too light and small to represent the best humanity had to offer. As such, the process started anew, this time with the famous Swedish ship Regalskeppet Vasa as the base, since it was a huge and impressive ship, representing the best 17th century baroque Sweden had to offer, which meant it was hopefully grand enough for Aetherial. This was to be the resurrection of Vasa, a chance to finally live up to the potential it was once designed with.
There were three versions of Vasa created for Aetherial, one with sails (like the original), one zeppelin-style, and one with a mixed method of flying. The zeppelin-style ship looked very soft and slow, what with its round balloon. It had connotations of being a carousel, or the 19th century hot air balloon of an exentric yet sweet (mad) scientist. The mixed version did perhaps not make a lot of sense logically, however, it communicated speed in a more effective manner than the zeppelin. The regular Vasa design seemed a little simplistic, it lacked a certain something to give it appeal. I think now that it might be because it’s somewhat unbalanced, the weight of the keel didn’t properly balance the hight of the mast. The general shape of the design is like a half circle that has been tilted, which makes it seem unfinished, unbalanced, and off. As such, our lead designer (and art QA) picked the mixed design.
This, I then coloured in a similar way to the first five ship concepts, which was in the colour scheme agreed upon at the time. The finished result was this final gif.
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