[PROJECT] Titan of the West
Titan of the West
“At the Western edge of the world stands a giant guardian, ever facing the wind, ever vigilant. It will not allow you to cross the edge of the world. It controls the winds with it’s magic sword and will send you homewards if you near the border of oblivion.”
Well that is obviously a problem for anyone hellbent to cross to the other side.
Hi, my name is Joas Kleine and I’ll be posting updates on here for the coming 10 weeks as I work on this project.
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In this week’s blogpost I’ll be explaining a bit of background behind the concept of the project and what I’ll be doing.
The project I’ll be working is a set piece design for a fictional video game along the guides of Shadow of the Colossus. This set piece is a boss battle design. The gameplay consists 3 main mechanics next to navigation in 3d space.(to keep it easy)
Climbing onto things(climbable things are highlighted in gold)
Bracing yourself when climbing or moving
Stabbing/Slashing
The bossfight I want to design is a tutorial boss fight used to introduce the player to the game, the world and the story. As such it’s important that the player can’t die/fail in this bossfight and must be given the opportunity to become familiar with the game.
Next week I’ll be diving more into the gameplay aspect but first a bit of story.
The idea/story behind the Titan(s)
The Titan is a guardian that was created along with the world, an ancient being born from stardust and represents one of the cardinal directions of the wind, West.
In this story there is a world beyond this one where our cosmic bodies and forces of nature are personified, not as gods but as giant creatures, ever existing,ever going.
And in this story, our world is dying.
“The world is dying, slowly suffocating, waiting to die. The Gods have left this world and now the only thing left is the earth and our misery. We rot away in our empty castles, with our faded magic and dusty books. A child is a rare sight, some have not seen one for many decades. Our cities crumble in the wind. Our world is ashen and dust.” - Grufled voiced main character
I gave myself this vague background story to have a lot of freedom, initially I wanted to work out 3 concepts but over time I came to realize that that was way too ambitious for my time and I wanted to make it into a good learning experience out of it.
The game is set in a semi generic fantasy world because I really wanted to focus on communicating gameplay, flow and atmosphere of the set piece with this project. Not to be bothered too much by world building/designing and more on a workflow which works. At the end of the project I’ll (hopefully) have come up with a full proposal that can be used to persuade other game developers to make a set piece like this.
How do I envision this set piece?
Glad you asked.
Titan of the West ;DRAFT 1
Intro
A ship sails towards through icy water towards the edge of the world. Here at the cliffs of the earth a lone Titan stands guard. This guardian wards all travelers from sailing over the edge. He holds a mighty sword which controls the wind. Those who ventures to close to the edge he blows back with a swing of his magical sword.
The lone sailor aboard the ship however means to go over the edge, to the other side.
He has come equipped with weapons of war and a determined mind. He sets sail straight towards the Titan. The Titan awakes and raises a hand in warning, the sailor ignores it’s signal.
Phase 1
The Titan raises his great sword out from the water and points it in the direction of the ship. Waves change direction as the wind picks up from behind the titan and a powerful gust sets the sailboat on a path away from the edge. The sailor grabs hold and braces one of the ores steering his ship back on path.
He readies a giant ballista to fire and aims it directly at the enormous titan and fires. With a heavy ‘thunk’ the bolt lodges itself deep into the Titan. This is the Sailor’s chance, he grabs the oar and sets course for the Titan once more.
As the Titan roars and pulls out the steel bolt from its body it has no chance to steer the wind and thus set the ship in a different direction. The ship crashes into the Titan with sheer force. The sound of wood cracking and a deep roar fills the air as the ship, Titan, Sword and Sailor go over the edge.
Phase 2
The sailor jumps from the bow of his ship onto the Titans foot and makes it’s accent while they fall through space, water filling the sky as myst condensing into the stars.
The sailor climbs from its leg to the Titans stomach. As the Titan shakes it’s legs the sailor braces and holds on for dear life but slips and slides back to the base of the Titans foot. He once more climbs the Titan as they are falling through space. He climbs along the body, jumps to the sword, the Titan roars and tries to grab the sailor. He clings himself tight.
The sailor hops to the Titan’s chest where light shines from a hole surrounded by a ring of gold. The sailor stabs at it with veracity. A roar! This hurts it, victory? But in that very moment the sailor is grabbed and pinned in the hand of the Titan and together they spin through space.
Phase 3
They crash into the edge of the other side, holding on just barely on the edge the Titan hangs. The sailor stabs into the Titans hand, releasing himself. He sprints towards the Titans head, dodges a swipe of it’s arm and stabs it in the eye.
The Titan let’s go and slips off, drifting into space. The sailor has reached ‘the other side’.
This draft was made after a lot of doodles, some brainstorming and working on gameflow.(more of that next week) It’s meant for me as a textual companion to all visual work I do so I can place them next to each other and compare.
In next week’s post I will be diving into the gameflow for this bossfight and how it informs my design process.
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The idea behind these blog posts is to show my progress on what I do but also to share and have a dialog. So if you have any feedback, questions or comments please leave that reply.
Joas Kleine
Replies
Titan of the West
“At the Western edge of the world stands a giant guardian, ever facing the wind, ever vigilant. It will not allow you to cross the edge of the world. It controls the winds with it’s magic sword and will send you homewards if you near the border of oblivion.”
How do you show something like this with just a flowchart? And how does that flowchart help your visual design?
Hi, my name is Joas Kleine and I’ll be posting updates on here for the coming weeks as I work on this project. A set piece bossfight for a fictional video game.
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This week I’ll be looking at flowcharts and how they can help you inform decisions and help as a communication tool. When I started out this project I thought I would be able to get away with just a bunch of pictures and a 50 page document describing everything.
And I could, probably. However it would require everyone that would theoretically work on this to read a whole bunch of text. However it’s not a very elegant method of communicating an idea. At Least that’s what I got convinced by after watching Stone Librande’s excellent series on one page designs.
With this in mind I set out to at least create a single one page document where you can find all the information if you'd actually want to create this set piece. Starting with a flowchart of the entire encounter, what you can do in it and where you’re going as a player.
At first I thought about it just as you would design a puzzle, all the gameplay in one place, simple straightforward lines.
At first Phase 1, it looked like this. Showing how to solve this particular ‘puzzle’. It’s straightforward and does communicate how to make the puzzle in broad strokes.
However what this does not communicate are visual cues or sequences. I needed a way to implement those as well. More on that in a bit.
A way this helped me a lot in informing my visual design was in scale, if you know how long and far the player has to travel it can give you a sense of scale in the abstract.
This is the flow for Phase 2 where the player scales the Titan and climbs over its body all the way from the foot to it’s chest to stab it in the heart. Now this does not show scale but it does give some space where I can fill in time variables so in my mind I can map out the path and start thinking on how this will translate into a picture.
For example if the entire journey in one successful go takes x amount of seconds of play I can take all the individual time measurements between checkpoints and think about how many obstacles I want to have in place. Of course something like this will be tweaked and tooled a lot in a production phase with testing, but for now it helps me paint the picture.
Another way this helps with visual development for me is with sequences. Instead of storyboarding everything out I can easily iterate before spending too much time working on visuals.
Once I had all the pieces laid out before me like this. It informed me where I needed to extrapolate and show visual examples. This also helped me setup my brief for this project. Knowing what images I need to create etc. This set out my planning and scope for the project.
After some revisions and feedback the second version looks like this:
The flow for the set piece is established(it could use some more feedback and work, please if you have some be so kind to share) Additionally to gameplay I added circles and diamonds for Visual/Story beats and anywhere additional visual explanation will come in handy. This is the first setup that should lead to a large one page design document.
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The idea behind these blog posts is to show my progress on what I do but also to share and have a dialog. So if you have any feedback, questions or comments please leave that reply.
Joas Kleine