May Ahab a Moment of Your Time?: Designing the Leviathan (and Friends)
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I do not view myself as someone who thinks outside the box. Instead, I prefer to believe I bring a shovel before I go inside. By working within the confines of what is given to me, I feel I am more creative than if I was without constraint. It is this mentality I adopted as always when I began working with “Aetherial.” (Disclaimer: The following work is representative of an ongoing process and subject to change) BrainstormingIn the beginning of development during initial brainstorming, I thought of the ships using the sails made of insect wings to fly. My reasoning behind this no more complicated than “I think it looks cool.” While I never brought it up with my group because I felt it would have been a hard sell on them, I did go further down that train of thought on my own. The first question to ask would have been “Where did the wings come from?” The answer to that was from the fallen creatures. So even though the ship wouldn’t have bug wings, the creatures would. I have designed two of the creatures presented in the concept document. For the “Aether Ray,” I tried to mimic the insect wing venation of a cicada before settling on a mayfly’s, and for the “Sky Slug,” I took inspiration from a swallowtail butterfly. While sadly, the “Tangler” (an enemy with a melee attack) has been binned by my group in favor of a turret enemy, that has been assigned to the other artist in my group. Which leaves me to design the remaining foe, the boss of Biblical lore, the Leviathan.   The background of our game is designed so that it will transition from a sunset to nightfall as the player heads closer and closer to the boss. This combined with the tagline “Moby Dick in the skies,” gave me the perfect opportunity to go all the way with said tagline and put my own twist on the White Whale. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use a rhinoceros beetle as a baseline for the ‘wings’ of the Leviathan. In doing so, I could keep the profile that makes a whale a whale while still keeping the enemies thematically consistent. As a side benefit gameplay-wise, this introduces a potential future mechanic where there is a weak spot under the elytra (the part the beetle opens up to fly) and the player must wait until it is exposed to strike. The Design ProcessSince the White Whale was specifically a sperm whale, that was the species I chose. I used the proportions of a female sperm whale because it is about three heads long as opposed to a male’s three-and-a-half heads and that makes to more closer to a beetle’s proportions. For the beetle, I settled on a combination of the Caucasus beetle and the five-horned rhinoceros beetle as a base. I moved the fins of the sperm whale from the body and onto the legs while also making them resemble beetle wings. For the eyes, I wasn’t sure whether to place them where a whale’s or a beetle’s are. In the end, I went with both. My decision to use red and go against the color guide of blue, yellow, and orange in the concept document was to continue with the White Whale theme and make the Leviathan an albino. In the concept document of Aetherial, the enemies all had these crystals growing out of them. While I liked the idea, for the Leviathan, I tried to place them in an area that felt more “natural” for lack of a better term. Since there are hairs between the head and abdomen of a beetle, I felt that was the best spot. I also made a beard of crystal and a hole in the head where a crystal is hovering because, yet again, I thought it looked cool. The Progress So Far The above is a quick thumbnail of what the Leviathan would look like with the elytra open and the inside exposed. The reason it does not resemble the drawing on the bottom is because it is based on an earlier iteration. My group believed I was drifting off into “beetle” rather than “whale” and told me to reel it back a bit. While this is far from finished, I hope this offered a brief insight into my creative process. That’s all for now. Good bye, and take care.  |