A couple of weeks ago we shared the first screenshot of our pre-alpha build which led to a VERY enthusiastic response from the community that humbled us and a lot of feedback from gamers in website from all around the world like Adventure Gamers, Adventure Treff and Przygodomania.
The general consensus was that the backgrounds were lovely and the hand drawn quality of it was appreciated. Also that it matched the style of the characters pretty well, although some felt the characters seem “pasted” in the background, something that we hope to address through more accurate dynamic lighting.
On the other hand, Simon himself wasn’t setting anybody world’s on fire. Quite the opposite, raining on everybody’s parade.

Although most fans that we showed the pictures to seemed to be aware this was an older Simon, they still thought it didn’t look like him. Everybody had a different opinion on how they remembered him. Some like a caricature of Wreckless Eric, others really couldn’t explain it but just thought it was not how he was supposed to look like.
It was a problematic situation that brought forward the question: What does Simon look like?
As part of the discussion that came up in Adventure Gamers I addressed this issue to try and drive the debate towards a more productive/measurable route:

One of the biggest challenges so far it’s that, IMO, everybody has a different perception on how Simon is supposed to look.
Since the art from Simon 1 and 2 was still very imprecise in terms of character face details (because of the nature of that style of pixel art), and the depiction of Simon there was so different from Simon’s Pinball, and all of these so different from Simon’s 3D and its concept art and even more different from Simon 4th and 5th…well, how his face looks it’s pretty much floating somewhere in our collective conciousness.

What most gamers seem to agree though is on its personality traits and even some of his hobbies. That’s what we’re trying to convey. Something that looks like a Simon would feel.

Essentially, it’s not easy making the transition from this:

Simon The Sorcerer – Beautiful sprite but we won’t be getting a lot of information out of that handful of pixels’ face.

To high-res 2D art. Specially when the 3D renditions have looked like this:

Simon The Sorcerer 3D – Pointy nose, black hair, long face, ponytail makes a comeback.

Simon The Sorcerer 4 – Blue eyes, short hair, wider nose, high cheekbones.

Identical, aren’t they? So to focus on his personality and come up with our own portrayal that was representative of those traits, the traits that fans remembered him for and the ones we needed to highlight in this instalment, made more sense.  Surveying around, we came to a few conclusions on what’s that people remembered the most of Simon and Anna tried to convey that in a more expressive face. This was the result of the concept piece that we shared through social networks some days ago:

Take 2 of Simon

This was way, way better received than our previous piece and based on that our animator, Sara, developed another in-game piece that as usual in our workflow, remains truthful to the concept art. I present to you a new Simon for Between Worlds:

Same old robes, a more playful face and a beard because he THINKS that looks cool.  We’re much more happy with this rendition and we wouldn’t had taken it here without your enthusiastic comments. Positive or negative, there’s always something we can take from it even if know we won’t be able to please everybody.
What do you think? Drop by the forum and share more thoughts.

‘Till next one!

If you’ve been with us this far, you’ll have seen Simon and his alternate universe sort-of-twin Simone. Well, with the game crossing between their two worlds many of the established characters in the series get to appear in two alternate forms. This week I’d like to take a look at both versions of Simon’s (and Simone’s) mentor, Calypso.

But before we get into that though, a short diversion:

The first thing that fans of the fourth and fifth Simon games will notice when they see the new designs for Calypso is that he’s standing up. He’s probably even breathing and shambling about too, he is – not to put too fine a point on it – not dead.

Suffice to say for those not familiar with the later games, he got killed but isn’t dead in our game, which brings us to the question of continuity. When we set out to make the new game, we had a decision to make. While we wanted to acknowledge the events in the older games, we also had to take new players who hadn’t played any of the previous games into account.

Anyone making something new in an old series is faced with a choice like this and we duly spent many long hours arguing about it. At times we thought that we could simply accept all the older games without overloading newer players with complex back story, but it quickly became clear that events in the last two games changed the setup considerably and would require a lot of explanation.

New players who liked our game and wanted to go back and play the older series to pick up the story would also (as of the time of writing) find that the last two games are no longer available, barring them from understanding what was going on. The fact that the original designers didn’t have any input into either game helped tip us over into thinking that it was best to only count on the earlier episodes.

That said we understand that those games have their fans and we intend to use the dimension-jumping aspect of the new game to acknowledge them.

Anyway, back to Calypso:

We needed two versions of the character and while Simone’s world doesn’t contain the ideal version of everyone from Simon’s world, we felt that in this case the mentor should reflect their student. Simon’s Calypso is fairly senile and crazy, while Simone’s Calypso is far more competent and dignified.

We decided to start with Simon’s version as he was the one that we were all used to. In the earlier games he looked much like a classic, flaky wizard. We wanted to push his decline on a bit to reflect the passage of time. The design on the right is where we ended up after seeing just how far we could push him before he became a bit creepy.

The ideal version turned out to be a bit easier to do, given that everyone has a pretty good idea what dignified and powerful old wizard looks like. It was just a case of taking that idea, blending it with design cues from the dishevelled version and then experimenting a little with the details. In the end, we opted for the design on the right.

I guess we’ve covered some potentially controversial ground this week. Drop over to the forum and let us know how you feel.

In recent blogs, we’ve been looking at some of the characters that will appear in the game. In some cases, I’ve made reference to how we get to their final design without going into a whole lot of detail about how we got there. This week, I’d like to take a minor character – a ghost pirate captain – and walk you through the design process step by step.

Now, you may well ask why I chose to do it with this guy and not Simon or Simone, and that’s a fair question. In both those characters’ cases I think that where they sit in the game is going to be a lot more important to most of you than how they look.

On the other hand, the Pirate Captain is a new character. You have no idea who he is or what he does in the story and, because he’s new, nobody should have any strong feelings about how we’re using him in the story. This (for once) is not the place for spoilers.

So this is where we started – a Dead Pirate Sketch (insert your own Monty Python gags here, folks). The concept artist’s brief just said he was a ghostly pirate – a classic, tri-corn hat wearing buccaneer seemed like a good starting point. He was immediately recognisable as a pirate, but not so much as a ghost – and this is where the experimentation starts.

Initially, we tried having parts of the character faded out then, we tried adding a glowing effect – neither seemed to do the trick. Making parts of the pirate obviously dead (missing eyes, lipless mouth, exposed ribs) certainly made him look like some sort of undead creature but the final effect was far too dark and serious.

We needed to make him read as a ghost without compromising the comedy, and that got us thinking about what else we could do. The old ‘head under the arm’ came up and was immediately rejected as being a bit dull but it started us down the road of wondering how he might have gotten himself killed in the first place.

We went through a selection of options from shark bites to musket balls, trying to think of ways to push them to the point where they stopped being a bit grim and moved more into Simon territory.

A shark bite is serious, but a penguin bite, or a puffin impalement?

Once Anna got to work on sketching some of this stuff, she came up with the idea of combining the classic legless ghost with that traditional pirate accessory, the peg leg.

We all agreed the leg had to stay but we still wanted to try giving him an obvious but ridiculous injury. As you can see, we tried putting just about everything through the poor guy from puffins to cannonballs.

In the end we opted for a penguin with a little trace of gore around the… entry to help sell the injury. We think it strikes the right balance – recognisable, silly, but not too cluttered. Drop along to the forums and let us know how you feel about it.

*No penguins (or puffins) were harmed in the creation of this character.