Heroes

We’ve been quite quiet lately. There have been many things to do, important stuff to fix, and not too much time to write blog posts. In some ways that’s a shame, but good things will come out of it. For example we’re working hard on creating a trailer for you all to enjoy. Of course we will make sure to share it with you when it’s done.

There’s been a lot of heroes in this project group. People who worked hard, and put in far more hours than can be demanded. I know that everyone in the group are thankful towards those individuals, that they’ve worked as hard as they’ve actually done, for without them we wouldn’t even be close to have a product as good as it currently is.

We’ve been kind of careful to show too much progress. Concept art and actual in game footage has been scarce. This is mostly because we initially agreed on not showing unfinished things, things that people might find odd. Also, the main character’s colours are a little bit too similar to the colours of another famous game character, but that is easy to change.

I want to sneak in a picture of some epic environment though (keep in mind it is still a work in progress), and with it introduce our main character:

In-game screenshot

Our hero
Our hero, or main character, got no name. Nor does it have a specific sex. We wanted to keep the main character as undefined as possible – it should be up to the player to build their own picture of what happened in the world, who the main character is, and what role it played in the events before the beginning of the game. We want the player to interpret as much as possible.

As you can see in the picture though, the character wears a poncho, and got some sort of peg legs. It also has antennae (or maybe it’s some weird kind of ears?) connected to the side of its head. It is a humanoid; it shares some traits with the regular human, but is something completely different. 

Like the environment, the main character was also “created” already in the pre-production phase. We had a general idea of how we wanted the character to look, and the process from early concepts to the current form can be seen here: 

Early character concepts by Gabriel Björk Stiernström



Character concept by Johan Wibrink

Possible colour combinations

The history of the character is unknown to the player (like everything in the game), but we developers know what happened. We know what the main character did before the beginning of the game. As I wrote earlier, we will try to use “audio flashbacks” to tell the story, this will hopefully help the player interpret.

If the player doesn’t understand the audio, it doesn’t really matter too much. We can always hide behind the fact that we wanted to make an experimental game, with different solutions when it comes to gameplay as well as narrative. If the player fails to understand that the audio actually is a flashback though, we have failed. It’s exciting, and a unique learning experience, both for me and Isak Arbman as a game writers, as well as for the sound designers.

What we can conclude with is that the main character is – and will remain – a mystery, in the way that we wanted it to be from the beginning.

- Lukas