"Once we had established where our gameplay areas would be on Kewa, we needed a new visual design that blended well between the playable areas and the Kewa model."
CM's note: we promised our next big dev diary in December, but after considering that pretty much everyone is already in holiday mode (including our audience), that’s been pushed out to January.
So - here’s a mini diary to help fill the gap. I coerced our art lead Tom into going deep into the archives for some images that demonstrate the development of Kewa’s visual design, from concept art to what we see today. Designing Kewa is a uniquely challenging endeavour: they are not just a character, but also the nexus of the whole game - so it's necessary to take gameplay considerations very carefully. Please enjoy this fantastic account of Tom's process in designing our beautiful Space Whale.
Meri Kirihimete, everyone. See you next year!
In the beginning, I was asked by our Project Lead (Sam B) to come up with some designs for our space whale with his direction in mind. He wanted things to look less threatening to the whales found in Before We Leave yet still be very alien and different. There was mention of different biomes so I wanted to use some snowy mountains as a nice focal point for their head.
The original concept art:
This was made before we had to consider gameplay restrictions. Once we had established where our gameplay areas would be on Kewa, we needed a new visual design that blended well between the playable areas and the Kewa model (hence the visual theme of plates on Kewa’s back in later concepts). Concept art like this (where gameplay isn’t considered) is called aspirational concept art. It’s about inspiration, tone and visual style.
In the early days - when the plate idea became our direction, I did this paint-over on top of a very basic Kewa I made as a placeholder. A placeholder allows the programmers to move forward with development without the artists risking too much time creating an art asset that has a very high chance of being changed being that is so early in development (we’re still guessing how this game all works at this stage!):
As development went on, I updated the design to really lean into the plate aesthetic. It also made it easier to hide the fact that the playable area is just slapped on top of a whale model.
I think these are the best we have for a full depiction of what Kewa looks like:
Here are a few others too:
Below shows where I painted over an early 3D model of Rafal’s for feedback. The numbers are to point at areas of discussion. I think ‘1’ and ‘3’ were talking about the piles of broken Hexagons at the bottom of the slabs of Hexagons. ‘2’ is most likely referring to the large areas of flat planes that help blend the even larger slabs of Hexagons found on Kewa’s back, close to the gameplay areas.
Below: a gif showing a comparison - the added flat areas are a paintover (I screenshotted the model, then painted over parts in photoshop) and handy and quick form of concept art. The main reason for this paintover was to help the visual aesthetic - we wanted a better blend from the larger hexagon slabs to the sides of Kewa.
Result: We also added some floating chunks of hexagons and debris that float within Kewa's orbit - one of the many cool visual elements you can add when you are creating a biome that is a giant space creature made of some undefined rock substance.
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We wanted to lean more into Kewa being made of some ancient material that has either calcified from age or is simply made out of a rock like material. The moon was a great reference for this and helped us move the textures away from looking like skin and more like rock.
Here is a good example of a ‘Paintover’. This gives a really fast and accurate description of the changes I got Rafal to make on his model. Once again, a lot of the feedback is about making the textures look very old, brittle and rocky. You’ll also notice the blue that we added to Kewa to give them some more colour and vibrancy.
There are still a few more updates we will make to the Kewa visuals - game development is a slow process, and we have to prioritise what we work on - so at the moment, some final touches to Kewa is low on the list but our dream is to make this mysterious beast as magical as possible.
