Aetherial: The Killing Machine
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Let’s dive right in. My first idea was to make a clear distinction between the player avatar and the enemies, I’m thinking Machine vs Nature. I want the player to feel like they’re in the wrong, like they’re destroying something beautiful. Hundreds of flying whales cannon balled from the sky, because of you. Why are you killing them? Maybe you’re sent out by a multinational corporation to harvest their precious Aether souls, or maybe you’re an overconfident rouge hunter with a weakness for cold hard cash. Either way, you’re a bad person. With that in mind, I went with a industrialized machine look for the ship while the enemies appear like beautiful creatures of the sky that they are. I will take on everything related to the player, AKA the killing Machine, while Merve does the base design for the first enemies (Nature). I believe that by splitting our artistic skills like this, we can kill two whales with one stone. This is because we are encouraged to make individual design choices, since doing so only strengthens the contrast between the player and enemy design, thereby increasing our efficiency without any real effort. For now the ship has simple colors (and is generally sloppy), but I would like to keep it somewhat close to this original figure in later iterations since it will be scaled down and I reckon a simple design makes it more distinguishable from what I anticipate will be rather complex background. This also makes it easier for me to make some groovy animations.
I have made separate layers for the ship components. Specifically I have made an axle for the two jet engines to rotate around, the idea is that they will position themselves by player input, so if the player moves forward the point backwards if the player moves backwards they point forwards etc. The gun might need to be re positioned at the roof of the ship so its at the center of the hit box.
Here is an idea for the bullet, far from done of course but I’m hoping it looks like something you don’t want to get hit by. Stay tuned.  |
Inspiration taken from Guns of Icarus and that space ship cutout in F11.