ESCAPE - Onigokko - Team Karakuri
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Hey guys, long time no post. Anyways, I'm starting this thread off by introducing our team members (I'll keep it brief.)
- Casey Matsumoto, concept artist. url]http://www.caseymatsumoto.com/[/url Used to work at Konami (Silent Hill 4: Downpour, Metal Gear Rising) and at Rhythm & Hues (The Seventh Son.) He fits in a suitcase.
- Daniel Stultz, concept artist. url]http://tulkaslaughs.blogspot.com/[/url Works at Carbine Studios (Wildstar.) His hair is really red.
- Dylan Brady, character/creature artist. url]http://dylan-brady.com/[/url Works for 3dmotive and Emerald City games. He modeled a modular human centipede for game jam.
- Myself, An-Tim Nguyen, environment and technical artist. url]http://www.nguyenantim.com[/url Used to work at Lukewarm Media (Primal Carnage.) I am now at Plastic Piranha (Rekoil + unannounced project.) I have a black hole for a stomach.
Together, we are Team Karakuri! :poly142: (You probably don't know what it means either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakuri_ningy%C5%8D)
Stay tuned!
- Casey Matsumoto, concept artist. url]http://www.caseymatsumoto.com/[/url Used to work at Konami (Silent Hill 4: Downpour, Metal Gear Rising) and at Rhythm & Hues (The Seventh Son.) He fits in a suitcase.
- Daniel Stultz, concept artist. url]http://tulkaslaughs.blogspot.com/[/url Works at Carbine Studios (Wildstar.) His hair is really red.
- Dylan Brady, character/creature artist. url]http://dylan-brady.com/[/url Works for 3dmotive and Emerald City games. He modeled a modular human centipede for game jam.
- Myself, An-Tim Nguyen, environment and technical artist. url]http://www.nguyenantim.com[/url Used to work at Lukewarm Media (Primal Carnage.) I am now at Plastic Piranha (Rekoil + unannounced project.) I have a black hole for a stomach.
Together, we are Team Karakuri! :poly142: (You probably don't know what it means either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakuri_ningy%C5%8D)
Stay tuned!
Replies
Were loosely going towards "Hide and Seek" as a theme, or more specifically kakurenbo, as a sub-catagory within escape. Decided we want to show the Japanese childs game of hide and seek in which children put of face masks and hide from demons. we want to depict hellish monsters searching for children to gobble up with terrifying mouths and vacum like belleys.
Want to ground it in reality but warp it through the lens of a childs fears/imagination
Were considering going for a real-time anime style.
Essentially Ghibi meets steamboy in a kakurenbo theme
Some Concepts so far from Daniel Stultz: (Based off our initial theme of Hell, which is becoming a smaller element. but still great work.)
First I'm going to explain the initial "Hell" paintings that Daniel pushed early on: when we first started recruiting team members, we needed an interesting jumping point to further our project idea and plan. Since Dylan and I are good buddies and we both love crazy creature designs, our first gut instinct was to create some sort of scene where all architecture was composed of bits of limbs and muscle anatomy so that our roles could be interchangeable (thus "Hell.") However, we understood that we needed to explore further because we were really digging into the notion that you had to go for your "second best idea" rather than your first to avoid a lot of the generic creative pitfalls that most other teams were likely going to invest into (mainly due to common ideological/cultural associations of the concept of "Escape.") We had a strong desire to work on a project that would help us stand out.
After all of our team members were gathered, we established that all design/production decisions had to flow through two different pillars: visual narrative and emotional content (as opposed to games where everything serves gameplay.) We settled for something mainly inspired by Kakurenbo and Cannabis Works because we felt that they presented some very interesting (and slightly obscure) aesthetics that haven't reached most mainstream audiences due to slight cultural exoticism, especially in video games (we initially injected other inspirations such as Ghibli and Steamboy, but while we are still leaving the doors open to draw upon that visual language, it was becoming problematic over time due to our lack of design focus.)
The first narrative we pushed for was much more based in Kakurenbo where you had a bunch of masked children playing hide and seek with Japanese mythological demons: we had 5 kids who were hiding from one demon, and views from different camera angles would reveal their different hiding locations within the same scene. We also played with injecting a minor backstory where the demon was representative of their father, the kids would all be siblings, and the scene would be reminiscent of Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" where the demon was seeking to eat his children (we also brainstormed some minor visual touches, such as the kids having playful animal masks in contrast to the demon father having a frightening human one.)
We were all really stoked with our narrative, we were in a "blue sky" phase where we just set ourselves into an exploration of ideas before trying to narrow down our aesthetic. Daniel has been a beast, pumping out consistent work day after day while going to town with the early Steampunk inspiration (we liked referring to "Steamboy" because we were actively pushing away from Victorian-style Steampunk):
Casey, despite being crucial to the early creative brainstorming with his strong knowledge of Japanese cultural archetypes and mythology, had unfortunately been completely overwhelmed by one of his freelance clients so he hasn't had the chance to be as prolific during this vital phase of development.
We were not in an ideal situation with our loose production schedule at that point. While we were slightly starting to panic about the narrowing deadline for a real-time 3D submission, we were determined not to compromise the pre-production phase due to both initial positive reception and the avoidance of potential headache later down the line. As a result the 3D team (Dylan and I) attempted to create some concept/mood art as well, with some pretty poor results at much slower output rates. Dylan started off in Zbrush but later got much better results in Photoshop:
On the other hand, I was generating some really lackluster content due to my lack of concept skills in Photoshop and Zbrush, so I later switched to pen and paper. (I'm still posting these disasters to paint a larger picture of our design process.)
We were lagging behind and our "blue sky" phase was almost over. Dylan and I decided to get together in person this weekend and to start analyzing our production problems and figuring out solutions to resolve them. We had to reduce our narrative scope if we were going to hit our target: we are now aiming at 1 polished character (boy or girl, to be determined) and one insane-looking monster. The emotional content has been shifted from a dynamic scene of collaboration and escape to a very predatory horror scenario. Instead of being a reinterpreted Goya's Saturn piece, it is now a more powerful metaphor about a masked protagonist attempting to affirm his/her own sense of identity against a physical manifestation of his/her own doubt that is seeking to destroy him/her.
We chugged an entire pot of coffee, exchanged ideas back and forth non-stop, stayed up all night sketching on pieces of paper about the design of this new demon while again, desperately trying to get rid of our "first best idea." Here is the result in non-chronological order (top sketches are Dylan's, middle and bottom sketches are mine.)
While it still requires additional polish, we are narrowing it down to the idea that the demon is part of a vertical composition/claustrophobic environment, and who is able to descend on his victims from a nest/web of cables from above like a marionette spider: it is a demon-possessed puppet with disturbing human-like features. We are still playing around with ideas such as the victim protagonist wearing a bee mask to contrast the spider-theme. The environment's design is going to stem from this narrative and emotional intent, which we have already started blocking out a layout (it's still extremely abstract and default lighting is temporary. It is important for us to capture the overall mood before injecting detail.)
Again, thank you for your feedback. Stay tuned.
Warning, this is going to be yet another image-heavy update so get ready.
First off, narrative. Last time we had forced ourselves to switch from a Goya tribute to the metaphorical struggle of affirming one's identity: this was due to very heavy immediate production concerns regarding the number of unique characters we could crank out (going from 5 kids + 3 monsters to 1 kid + 1 monster.) But on further deliberation, we started becoming aware that it really didn't feel quite right because we were missing our target aesthetic: the depiction of this type of personal struggle did not fit the framing of a Japanese anime-inspired narrative. Individual torment tends to be portrayed as a group concern which they eventually manage to overcome through solidarity and teamwork. We needed to push and implement some implicit theme of social infrastructure if we wanted to make both narrative and aesthetic resonate properly.
We needed at least 3 kids to turn it into a story of a group facing adversity, but we later figured that we could narrow it down to 2 if we opted for an even stronger social bond: it became no more about the trouble of a tight group of friends but about the dilemma of a broken family.
Our story is based off of an old tale from feudal Japan: there was this family whose father had died in war. The mother later died in a house fire, trying to save her kids. Out of her love and pain, she returns from the dead to "take care" of her children, but instead desires to kill them so that they could join her in the afterlife (Guillermo del Toro's "Mama" is loosely based off of this premise.)
We have not ignored our previous forays into Kakurenbo and Steamboy/non-Victorian Steampunk aesthetics. Kakurenbo was an animated short where the demons chasing children was a metaphor for the loss of traditional childhood games (in this case, Hide and Seek) in favor of the technological and industrial evolution of Japanese culture. What we currently refer to as Steampunk used to be known as "science fiction" by the likes of Jules Verne or H.P. Lovecraft from the advancement of the industrial revolution in their time. Our story would be placed towards the end of the Edo period (think The Last Samurai) when Japan started embracing the modernizing culture from the West.
The Steampunk aesthetic was therefore justified thematically: we were creating a story not only linked to the Japanese feudal era, but we were embracing the aesthetic that the children were representative of Japan's loss of cultural innocence from technological advancement of the West. Our protagonists were modeled after Hansel and Gretel from the Grimm Brothers where they had to outsmart and overcome a child-eating witch. Our older brother (Hayate) and younger sister (Hana) would have to overcome their mother (Kasan) who had returned for them.
Daniel iterated some early sketches based off of the spider drawings that Dylan and I had created last weekend. These were instrumental to pushing the design in this new direction because we had recently started using Google Hangout to communicate ideas and changes on the fly in real-time.
This painting however is Dylan's, attempting to communicate some intent in the arm's structure. We pushed our egos aside and we trusted each others' sense of taste to explore more challenging designs.
Casey however had been pulling a lot of weight to compensate for last week's loss of time from freelancing. For the characters, we first explored Edo fashion since the children were supposed to embody Japan's cultural innocence of the time. We later realized that it wasn't working as well as we had intended because it was lacking some interest and personality due to its heavy anchoring in visual stereotypes. We needed to leap further, so we pushed the Steampunk aspect a little more to fit in a more Steampunk environment while suggesting a lesser obvious colder climate (we have been studying a lot of Koji Morimoto's design language in search of creative solutions.)
Hayate's and Hana's silhouettes have been intentionally kept less intricate because they needed to contrast with the hostility of the environment they were and with the antagonist's design (more specifically on that later.) To really push the demon-mother, we pushed the idea of mechanical puppetry even further to play on the dichotomy between the inorganic nature of her components and the fact that she was attempting to portray herself as living with the shapes of arms, legs, a face, etc (as if the representation of advancing technology tried to become more human while attempting to drag the living into its own nature... if that makes any sense.) We drew a lot of inspiration from Ghost in the Shell for that matter, despite Ghost in the Shell being a sci-fi source (we also kept referring to Tanaka Tatsuyi, Steamboy, Akira, Tetsuo the Iron Man, various medical conditions, etc.)
Again, thanks to Casey and Google Hangouts, we pushed the design iterations and suggestions further and further, constantly weaving back to our pillars of narrative and emotional content. We steered away from Kakurenbo because it was too "Tiki" styled for our aesthetic needs and pushed deeper into Japanese horror. The first demonic mask design later got replaced with the scary woman one because at one point, we really started losing the idea that this monster is supposed to be the children's mother instead of some random demon puppet (early designs were also very reminiscent of Joker from "The Batman" animated series despite make-up changes.)
For the bigger picture, we still wanted to push that contrast between the characters and the environment/demon. Aside from design complexity, level of detail, and scale, so we started studying other pieces of reference where characters were visually separated from their environments. We gained early interest in cel-shaded rendering styles to approximate a semi-realistic anime-aesthetic, so we started playing with the idea of having the characters rendered differently from their settings to emphasize on that dichotomy.
We needed to know if it were even possible with our own technical skill sets. So a few tests later I managed to create a base shader that was capable of cel-shading, specular and generating outlines independently from the environment (individual material-based instead of global post-process based.) Early tests attempted real-time cross-hatching or even screen-toning, but it is possible to just disable it altogether. Tweaking will depend on the end-result, so everything is still up in the air about it, but at least we know that it is an open possibility. (In case anyone is interested, this test model is Sabriel by fellow team-member Dylan Brady. She was designed to be rendered realistically so it was interesting to observe how her texture maps and geometry were affected with this style.)
In our next update, we wish focus a lot more on environments (specifically abstract blockouts so that we can study mood/emotion and composition on a subconscious level before thinking about detail and clutter.) I hope you enjoy our work so far, stay tuned!
Daniel And Casey collaborated on this environment concept.
And Ive done some blockout of the mother character.