Thoughts on Bloodborne

For the Games Development Society, my role is to create art for the level, and also the silhouetted character's run, jump, and slide animations. This meant looking into animation, which seems like an extremely interesting topic; designing a run cycle for a creature design later might be interesting, seeing how different gaits affect how its presence comes across.

Alongside making art, I've been drawing traditionally in my sketchbook for creatures designs for Bloodborne, my current mini-project. Currently I don't know whether to design a whole new area, a Chalice Dungeon (randomised underground areas full of various monsters), or just pick areas where creatures I have designed would fit in to. However, as I am quite familiar with the game (and in possession of the official guide, in lieu of an actual artbook) I have identified a few areas I feel could have been expanded upon:

• ambush-specific enemies - there is a creature in Chalice Dungeons that consists of a glut of blood and bones, which drops from the ceiling, spiders which do the same, and in the main game there are a few creatures set to run from around corners, and some that blend into their environment. However, they are all visible if you pay attention. Thus, one of my designs will involve trapdoor spiders, which could move between several places to ambush from, so the player would be on edge near all of them. One of the best designed ambushes in the game has one enemy run to the left of the doorway as a player approaches the room, whilst another, hidden one waits at the right-hand side - another enemy that did the same, but could teleport, could also be a possibility.
• crow boss - crows in the game are unusual, crawling on the ground instead of flying. A boss with similar capabilities (maybe something the citizens sacrificed humans/beasts to) would be extremely interesting, especially since in Japanese mythology there is a crow with three legs known as Yatagarasu, which could add new insights to what the boss would be capable of.
• hunters and hunting dogs - in Namibia there are people with muzzled hyenas on the end of thick chains, treating them as dogs. Hunters in Bloodborne are often near rabid dogs, or hunting dogs (with blades strapped to them), so maybe a hunter that captured a lycanthrope and wrestled it into submission is not too far-fetched, owing to their level of skill within the game. Muzzled, the werewolf would not overwhelm the player when coupled with the hunter as well, especially when held on the chain - upon reaching a certain point of HP, the chain would snap and change the strategy of fighting dramatically.
• foxes - all the animals in Bloodborne that were not human to start with are scavengers, as the lore would have them surviving by eating the corpses of transformed humans. There are rats, dogs, pigs and crows, but no foxes, despite the area being urban. Currently, I am looking into designing foxes that fear the player, and kill any crows that the player leaves behind (a common thing, as crows are no real threat and players often have to travel across the level to get back to where they were before death). Each crow killed would empower the fox (potentially up to three kills) until it stalked and attacked the player randomly on their journey.
• cats - despite the townsfolk being extremely superstitious, warding off beast-hood with incense, and burning transformed beasts on stakes, giving a feel of old witch-hunts, there are no cats around at all. Either it is to keep the idea of wolves alone, the dogs killed them, or it is to be assumed all the cats were burned immediately in superstition (there are cat corpses in the Chalice Dungeons). Either way, a cat would offer a new, small threat - if they are indeed linked to superstition, perhaps their attack causes ill effects, rising with each consecutive hit. Or perhaps they are barely alive, crawling from bonfires in a mess of smoke, blinding the player as they approach more threatening enemies.
• horses - there are no living horses - every one is frozen or burned or starved on the ground. However, a hunter on horseback would offer a whole new challenge, and could be something to consider.
• weapons - as the beasts are winning the war, enemies with visible signs of injury would be an interesting point to notice, especially as there are several distinct weapons in the game - imagine running across an enemy with the blade of a katana buried in it, when your own character wields the same blade. My favourite idea for this involves a giant wheel weapon called Logarius' Wheel, which is a bludgeoning tool - having it buried in the skull of a boss would be an unusual feature and a possible weak-point of the enemy.
• eyes - early game, the enemies are bestial and wolf-like. Late game, in an area that studied insight in the lore (insight being represented by eyes), creatures have multiple eyes, there are more bug-like enemies, and more unrecognisable/unearthly creatures. Potentially more of the original creatures could be deformed in this way, and gain more eyes, or, as one of the early bosses shows, they could be wearing eyes to try and gain insight. Carrion crows eat the eyes of the dead first, so one dressed in eyes would be an interesting turn of events.
• rats - rats only appear in the main game in the sewers, and they feel fairly under-utilised - a rat-king (an exceedingly rare creature created by baby rats' tails getting tangled and knotted together) would be a much more threatening strong enemy/boss, made of multiple rats that could work together for more unique attacks.

Additionally, DLC for Bloodborne came out yesterday - I intend to play it through and examine the new creature designs, and see if any of my identified areas have been used within the new content - it is a fairly unique opportunity and one I intend to take full advantage of. I will also have to look up more of the lore of the game and see how the new creatures fit across the categories of the original ones.

References

Haven't updated for a while as I have been busy finding sources of research so I can write my essay. I'm currently reading "Evolving the Alien" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, and will add any interesting/applicable quotes I find to a subsequent post.

[literature - book]
"The Skillful Huntsman" - Khang Le, Mike Yamada, Felix Yoon, Scott Robertson (Design Studio Press, 2005)
This book features three top students and their tutor developing concept art around the Brothers Grimm tale of the Skillful Huntsman. They had completely free reign with what they could create, and met each week to share ideas and give feedback on everyone's work. It features artwork from initial thumbnail concepts to coloured pieces, and each page is commented on by both the student responsible, and the tutor overlooking the project. With such free reign to work in, they found extremely interesting and unique ways to illustrate the characters, creatures and environments found within the short tale.

The fact that all of the design process is shown for each section is extremely useful for finding a good workflow - all three students used silhouettes and thumbnail sketches to gain senses of their designs, even though their mediums were different (digital, graphite and brush-pen respectively). All of them tried to be as different as possible, and not follow the usual route, and the general themes they went for were definitely unusual (i.e. a cactus forest). They blended the familiar with the unfamiliar and it seemed like an interesting design process to consider.

"Fantastical design is a juggling act between familiarity and strangeness. Make an alien character too alien and the audience won't relate to it ... most alien designs in movies have human features." (pg 32, Khang)

"It's good to explore absurd ideas because the solutions to these problems can create new and unique ideas." (pg 50, Khang)

"That's the nice thing about fantastical films. You don't really have to explain how things work, just as long as they appear consistent with the fantastical rules you set forth." (pg 52, Khang)

"An outrageous-looking machine will appear to work if there are details that the viewers recognize for their function in the contemporary world." (pg 54, Khang)

"It is interesting to observe the influence that the pose of the figure has on our interpretation of the character design. We are so conditioned to reading subtle body language that we cannot help but assign feeling to the pose of the figure and a like or dislike for the design." (pg 114, Scott)


[literature - journal]
"Monster Design and Classifier Cognition" (Larry Hong-Lin Li, Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2015) (found here) [x]
This study looks into how mythological creatures are often composites of two or more animals (i.e. a griffin is a lion and an eagle combined), and thus whether we process their overall design as an animal or as something completely unseen before. The findings suggested that in general they are considered animals, as they contain recognisable parts that we identify as familiar.

It was an interesting read; people in the study tended to view mythological creatures more as animals than as unidentifiable entities as they could recognise the animal parts within them. It would have been interesting to see just what creatures were chosen for the study, and which exactly tended to stray towards unclassified rather than animal-like.

"Monsters are imaginary or legendary creatures invented in science fictions, fantasy stories, comic books, and video games ... Some of them are so famous and appealing that they keep people intrigued."

"Designing monsters and fictional creatures is a great challenge because their unusual appearances and structures call for creativity, imagination, and inventiveness. Especially, these mythological living entities are noteworthy since they are a synthesis of common life forms on one hand, and they are newly coined objects on the other hand. What is intriguing to us is, given the two potential interpretations, how they are construed and conceptualized in human mind."

"Ward invited college students to draw aliens from other planets by imagination. They were instructed to be as imaginative as possible to design creatures. Most of their creations preserved the main features of animals found on earth. What is more, when they were required to draw creatures with feathers, they inclined to add wings and beaks."

"Human beings tended to preserve the co-occurring features of real creatures even when they were required to design a novel living object."

"Human beings evaluate fictional information using real world knowledge." 

"Fictitious creatures are encoded with reference to our understanding of real life forms."


[literature - journal]
"What Belongs in a Fictional World?" (Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Joshua Goodstein, 2009) (found here) [x]
A study trying to find out how many unwritten rules would be perceived in stories of varying fantastical natures - the closer the world was to our own, the more unwritten rules (i.e. maths, seasons) were considered to be there also, even if nothing ever alluded to them in the text.

It was interesting to discover that people add their own rules and ideas into stories and worlds despite them never being explicitly stated - within creature design, it would suggest that if the design featured something recognisable, people would link it to the animal it represented, and assume it survived the same way. For instance, if there was a tiger-like creature, and it was never explicitly stated that it breathed oxygen, and its organs were never shown, it would still be assumed that it did so, unless something within the world had already broken that rule (i.e. everything breathes nitrogen). This offers the idea that within creature designs, something familiar should be kept (a sense, a silhouette, perhaps colour) to unconsciously link the creature to the closest related animal, so the viewer gets an easy sense of it.

Monster Hunter is one of the best for viewing this: creatures like the Ludroth (an amphibious lizard) is clearly shown through colour and gait as similar to a water monitor or crocodile, so it is expected that it can swim better than it can run. The Royal Ludroth, the boss-type leader of the group, has a mane, clearly marking it as an alpha like a lion in a pride. Additionally, its silhouette is very similar to the California sealion's, restating it as excelling in water. Small details like that, even though the monsters themselves are different to things we have seen, allow players to unconsciously distinguish important facts about the monsters they are playing against. It would mean they aren't completely thrown when stumbling into a monster for the first time. They can infer ideas from its form, colour, locomotion, and try and prepare mentally without even consciously being aware of it. Bloodborne often throws curveballs with its monsters - extremely heavyset humanoids can move unsettlingly fast, just to disrupt this mindset from the player.

"Kelly and Keil (1985) found that the mythical creatures from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Grimm’s fairy tales also tended to preserve natural structures found in the real world, even though these are ostensibly fantastical tales."

"Adults use their knowledge of the real world to construct representations of fictional worlds. But how much of the real world belongs in any given fictional world? One possible answer to this question is that everything about reality is true in fiction unless it is explicitly forbidden by the text."

"This process of representing story worlds is known as the Principle of Minimal Departure (Ryan, 1980; see also Lewis, 1978; Walton, 1990), and it requires that the worlds of fictional stories be as similar to the real world as possible while still being able to support the events in the story. Although this principle seems intuitive, there are many cases in which things that are true in the real world are not true in a fictional world, even if the text does not explicitly forbid them."

"Reality forms the basis for fiction."

"As predicted, adults’ responses indicated that facts that hold true in reality generally also hold true in fiction, even in stories that are very different from reality. Having confirmed that reality forms the basis for fiction, we examined the rules that people use when importing real-world facts into a fictional world. One possibility is that fictional worlds resemble the real world as closely as possible. This hypothesis predicts that all real-world facts that are not explicitly violated in the story should be imported into the story’s fictional world."


Alongside researching, I have been continuing the idea of adding creatures to an existing game like Bloodborne. Whilst looking through screenshots of Bloodborne to get a feel for the colour palette utilised (typically grey, though the different stages of evening and night give a feeling of reflected colour from the intense shades of sky), I found a free guide by Mike Corriero that teaches how to make a custom colour palette from a selected image. It is definitely going to be a technique I try when I finalise designs enough to be coloured, as limited palettes are not something I have experience with.

Also, after replaying part of the game, I have noticed that there are a few enemies specifically hidden just to startle the player, so I might look into a creature with an ambush mechanic. In a forested area with lots of heather and shrubs, there are balls of snakes with very similar markings to their surroundings, making them unseen until practically stepped on. Perhaps a trapdoor spider in a foggy or cobwebbed area could apply a similar mechanic. Flightless crows lurking in dark corners are another - one that could suddenly fly would also be a good ambush creature.

Other ambushes used in the game are a monster bursting through the door as a player approaches/leaves, something pouncing just as they enter a room, or (and by far the best designed) one creature scuttles away in the darkness to one side of the room, causing the player to look in that direction, and a second creature pounces from the other side, unseen. As far as I know the latter is only utilised in one section of the game, so it could be applied to another monster (or one that uses the same idea but is solo, and teleports).

Wording

I'd recently been considering the wording of my project question - I knew it was to do with why certain mythological creatures have long-lasting designs (whilst others have fallen out of public knowledge) and what made them so effective - I felt like tightening the wording would make it easier to research elements of. I came up with "Why are classical creature designs more appealing than any recent creations?" or "What gives classical creature designs their long-lasting appeal, so much that new creature designs don't appear in other IPs very often?" (for instance, Tolkien's orcs are used in multiple IPs)

In the subsequent class we worked on our Learning Agreements so it was pretty good timing for thinking about my project. Working out the wording was fairly difficult, but eventually Eden and I developed a quick exercise where we had to verbally explain our work to each other without looking at the notes we had written on our Learning Agreements, and it really cut us down to the core elements of what we wanted to do.

I realised I wanted to explore creature designs from history, finding out why they are so integrated with our society to always appear in fantasy (and why some interesting creatures are never seen), and also look for correlations to see if iconic creature designs share common elements. Perhaps they're all from a certain period of history, or are linked to particular ideas and themes that strike interest (such as the werewolf representing the duality of man, the idea of an inner beast).

For this, I would be looking into the following:

• Why some classical creatures are popular, whilst others have fallen out of vogue.
• What makes a creature design iconic?
• Does the story behind the creature, or its behaviour/actions, have an impact on its popularity?
• Has the creature been written as a main character, which made it more appealing?
• Are recent creatures (in games/other media) actually unique, or accidentally recreating forgotten creatures?

I would have to research:

• Design origins of classical creatures - why they were made up, what made them stick
• Modern iconic creature designs - Alien, Monster Hunter, Pokémon, Bloodborne -  and their design inspirations
• Necessary elements to include when designing a creature - world-building, anatomy, familiarity of the design, audience, end use
• The effect of art styles, behaviour/mechanics, area of origin, lore, audience, media representation

Also, I follow a wide variety of artists on different social media (Facebook, Tumblr), and I could look into their design processes, and how their different art styles affect the feel of the creatures they design. For instance, I could look at the following (among others) :

• Terryl Whitlatch - has a foundation in scientific anatomical illustrations, can develop creatures through bone structure, muscles and the final piece
• Mike Corriero - extremely unusual and realistic looking creature designs - recently seem to be inspired by sea creatures
• Andrew Mar - brush-pen user, interesting inking style, often draws monsters
• Peter Han - brush-pen/watercolour user, very loose and dynamic

Overall I expect my project title would be summed up as "What makes a creature design iconic?", though it will probably change again with more research put into it.


Additionally, since my mini world-building project is complete, my second project is that I am developing ideas for creatures that would fit in pre-existing worlds. At the moment I am using Bloodborne, as it is the game I have most recently played and thus the world is fresh in my mind. I was going to swap games and try out other styles as well, but I am part of Steph's Games Development Society and wanted to leave a little time dedicated to that, so learning to draw in new styles might be best saved for another project later on, when I am more used to the society's demand. Also, staying within the realms of Bloodborne means I can explore further, more interesting ideas for creatures rather than creating one and moving on immediately.

Since Bloodborne is primarily people turning into either wolf-like or insect-like beasts, I decided to look at the animals first, to add something more unique - there are rabid, decaying dogs, giant boars, and flightless crows, none of which seem to suggest they were people first. All the animals are scavengers, but there are no cats - I expect, from the pyres and superstitions in the lore, that the cats were all destroyed, meaning I could potentially introduce a rare cat-like creature.

Another idea is a fox, which would be hidden near various patches of crows (perhaps randomly chosen), and if they player did not kill the crows, the fox would, and then stalk the player in a much more powerful form. I also considered some sort of mimic (though having it fit with the lore would be difficult - perhaps a mad hunter miniboss type enemy), which would disguise itself as another enemy by wearing its skin, though it would have more health and stronger forms of the same attacks. A phase two mode (80%, 50% or 30% health) would be the mimic throwing off the skin and revealing its true form, with a wholly different attack pattern.