Playing card design

The Devils hand.

It was always my desire to have the player play against the devil in a non violent game that would allow your opponent to cheat. I wanted the player to have to play a very rule oriented game of some simplicity, something along the lines of cups or cards. The player would have to play by the rules and the devil could cheat his way through the game. These are the card designs for the game you would play with the devil, I will be using these designs for business cards and possibly promotional material if there is no chance to implement  them in the final game.

Sam.

The cult of the Leviathan.

Concepts fot the cult of the leviathan. These designs were made to tie together aspects of the human/leviathan alligiance to make a recognizable force throughout the game. I have used the leviathan statue as a symbol of the leviathan cult itself on posters and in bronze masks the cultists wear. These will be used in the game in the main town to show the player how much influence the leviathan is exerting on the human population.

sam.

The Leviathan statue.

The Leviathan statue.

This is one of the most important pieces of the entire game. This statue is the main way a player can interpret how their actions are changing the game. The statue is in the centre of the town that the player runs around and all the villagers pray to it, as the player completes tasks the statues appearance will change. Help the leviathan worshippers and The statue will get more tentacles and look shiny and looked after, Harass and hinder the leviathan followers by helping the mythological beasts and the statue will became aged and dilapidated  There is even a few sneaky middle ground ones I'm working out but we will get to that later, I want it to be a lot more complicated than just good and bad and this leaves the player free to judge what the statue represents, I don't want it to be perfectly clear so that aspect of the game is open to player interpretation, to a degree obviously if you go around killing everything you will see this reflected very fast in the statue.

The statue design didn't take long to nail, I already had a pretty clear Idea of what I wanted, something symbolic and a touch abstract, After a few thumbnails I had it.


I started colour testing, This turned out to be harder to nail than I thought and needed alot of tweaking, it was important I chose a colour that felt neither good or bad but a happy boring medium but also stood out nicely against the town backdrop.

Still didn't quite have it...

I tested the statues against some backgrounds  one was a rough concept for the town (above) which was built for the purpose of the test, its the same grey as the majority of the background will be.


Heres a test against the most complete backround I have drawn by Max Perkins for 'Stop hitting me'
my mini game tech demo.

The final I went for is bronze although the base had to be tweaked to let the statue stand out. Bronze stands out well in the backdrop while not dominating the backdrop, it also ages well turning green in its age giving me some nice colours to play with when I go on to mess around with it later.




(Below)
Little design addition I did was to add the shape of the priests daughter into the leviathan statue, The leviathans stolen the priests daughter and I wanted some kind of symbolic representation of that within the statue, I like the idea the player may be able to spot this little easter egg him/her self although its only a very small detail.

Sam.

The Ceartas.

The Ceartas is the boat that carries the priest, after he is changed into a puppet to traverse the devils prison world the player must sail this vessel up to the island Tartarus. Ceartas is Gaelic for justice.

The Boat was always something I wanted to feature in the game and will be used at the beginning to teach the player the games controls, for instance the player will be required to jump up the mast and interact with it at the top to shift the sails. The player will sail the boat up to the island Tartarus and the games beginning to start the quest.

THE DESIGN.
The Ceartas is the boat the priest puts together out of the ruins left of his home town after the leviathan destroys it. The boats figurehead is a mixture of a selkie (half seal half women creatures of scottish folklore) and blind justice, this came from looking at the purpose of figureheads throughout history, they were mostly used to convey the name of the ship in a non-literate sense.

I researched into scottish fishing vessels quite a bit but disliked alot of what I saw so I had the priest construct the boat himself giving me le-way in my design to create something more suitable.

For a look at some early Scottish fishing boats that originally inspired the Ceartas take a look here.





With the boat done I started doing some concept bits and pieces to hand over to other team members, finding a look between real and puppet world was interestingly more complicated than I thought it would be.

Writing and  drawing a walk through of the game is my task now. The theory is really important, if the ethical game-play doesn't communicate to the player then the whole game wont play as I wish.


Sam.

The orcadian creatures.

From left to right: The brownie, the ceasg or mermaid, the giant and the wulver.

Concept art for the devil.

                                 
                                     The Idea is everytime you see 'old scratch' (the devil)
                                     he will have a different face, heres a few concepts for his face.