[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).
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