Characters - Wyrms

The Wyrms are a peace loving creature which were created by Brahma. with this came their divine power and the Empire relies on them to uphold this power and stability and prosper through it.

For their design, we took inspiration from Ao Kuang, the "Dragon of the East Sea" from Chinese mythology. He was said to control the waters and kept the seas calm. We decided to seek him as inspiration because of how he is a symbol of eastern dragons, which are snake-like in appearance - something we wanted as we found it very appealing and it appealed to our initial idea of knowledge inscribed on the 'bookworms'.

Characters - Vinayakas

The Vinayakas are a Hindu demon that like to create obstacles for people. We thought that this would be a good starting point for our game as it would give reason to the events and to the puzzles and problems the player will have to solve.

we looked into Hindu iterations of these demons (looking into common themes etc.) and Joe made the designs. In Hindu texts, there are four Vinayakas, so we would have 4 demons, however for the time being we have one designed. These were conceptualised by Joe.

Characters - Twins

Early on, we decided that the Empire was going to be ruled by two Twins created by Brahma. Initially we were going to have one male and one female to have a stronger juxtaposition of their character. However, after much thought we ended up settling on two females. Zak did the designs of the females, looking into female fashion and hair styles. The idea behind their design was to give them a natural look to them, much like Dahrma.

Characters - Dahrma

This is the player's character, Dahrma, who is created by the Twins to seek out and recover the Wyrms. From the beginning, we decided we wanted this character to be an Elemental (he was going to be part of the Empire's people who were also going to be Elementals, but then we decided to change that.) Lennon made the designs for this character, looking into other examples such as golems.

 

This is the final iteration of Dahrma. As you can see, it is designed to look like it was made from the realm, an Elemental. We decided on this early on when we were discussing about everyone in the Empire being Elementals. As you can see, its design is humanoid, made out of rock and vines, mimicking the kinds of areas that the player will be exploring later on.

Revised Concept

After discussion with the project leader, we found some major holes in our initial idea. So we went back and revised our idea.

Our final idea is now that the Empire still exists and the twins still rule, but instead of the worms mysteriously disappearing and sending the Empire into chaos through lack of knowledge (as it would not make sense for the inhabitants to simply forget everything) instead the Wyrms provide divine power, protection and stability as they were created by Brahma. One day, these Wyrms are driven away by the Vinayakas, a Hindu demon that loves to create obstacles and problems for people. These Vinayakas drive the Wyrms away and leave the Empire defenseless for a coming army. The player is created by the Twins to go out and return the Wyrms before the army of demons arrives and help the Empire's army defend.

Concept Ideas and Inspiration

The inspiration for the environment design is coming from Hindu and Tibetan culture. I say this because, while we want the design to be themed around Tibet, we also want the city to be feeling very dense and populated. India is an especially good place for this as the city tends to build up more than out in a kind of hap-hazard way, resulting in what looks like one house on top of another, and continuously stacking like this. I also looked into India's Holi Festival as the bright colours that they throw at each other is the kind of colours that we want to use in our game. Of course, I have also looked into Tibetan culture and their architecture, trying to find common themes between them that we can try to implement into our game.

People enjoying the festival, throwing the gulal at each other. As you can see, there's a whole spectrum of colours here of reds, blues, yellows, greens and violets. They're all very vibrant.

The wolf mask has nothing to do with the festival itself, it's just someone having a bit of fun and I quite liked how the image looked. It really shows of the relaxed feel of this festival as people dress up in costumes (like this wolf with sunglasses) and really treat it as a bit of fun.

The above images are all from the Holi Festival. The Holi Festival is celebrated on the day after the full moon in early March every year. It originated as a festival to celebrate good harvests and fertility of the land and has now transformed into a symbol of commemoration of a legend from Hindu Mythology. The story centres around an arrogant king who resents his son, Prahlada, for worshipping Lord Vishnu. He attempts to kill his son but fails every time. Eventually, the king's sister Holika, who is said to be immune to burning, sits with the king's son in a huge fire. However, the prince emerges unhurt while Holika is burnt to death. Holi commemorates this event and huge bonfires are burnt on the eve of Holi as its symbolic representation. (source: http://www.indiaexpress.com/rangoli/holi.html 25/10/2013)


Today, Holi is an excuse for Indians to shed inhibitions and caste differences aside for a day of spring fever and fun. Tensions become relaxed, families shake hand and everyone chases each other with brightly coloured powder (known as gulal) and water over each other, all in good fun. Bonfires are lit in the night to clean the air of evil spirits and to symbolise the destruction of Holika (similar to how we set up a bonfire to symbolise the death of Guy Fawkes.)

I really like this festival. The symbolism of it and the bright, vibrant colours that come out of it and what it's used for (breaking up bad relations etc.) The colours are all bright and kind of chalky, in that these are the colorus you find chalks to generally be in. It's the kind of style that we're after and the Holi festival depicts that perfectly.

The above three images I picked out to try and convey the dense and populated place that India is and the kind of atmosphere we're after. You can see all of the people shuffling around the city and how the buildings look like they're piled on top of each other.

This is a Hindu temple. I picked it out to kind of show what kind of designs they have for religious places. Tall towers and intricate stoneworks are a common theme here.

Above is images taking of Indian cities, such as Delhi, as well as religious buildings. I picked these images as they give the kind of dense environment that I mentioned earlier, where it looks as if one house was built on top of another to conserve space. It's brought it all into a kind of hap-hazard design.

The above image is a religious temple in Tibet. It looks like it kind of builds upon itself as it goes up.

 Tibet is known for intricate paintings along its interior designs.

  

The building below seems to crop up a lot when you search for Tibet on Google. It's called the Lhasa  Potala Palace. It's built on top of a steep hill and seems to have a very dominating presence in the province. The towering walls with its grand design and ascending stairs really gives it a feeling of importance. Inspiration from this building could be very useful when designing the centre of our city.

Ideas drawn up for the game.

 

Above is just a very basic idea. Not too pleased with it, so once I've finished I'll try redoing it but with more intricacy and a bigger building. This was kind of my first impression of Tibetan buildings.

 Below are just a bunch of random drawings as we were brainstorming different ideas for our game at the beginning. We played with many ideas, such as a floating island.

 

 

Teammate blogs:
http://zakfield.blogspot.co.uk/
http://pluckyduckart.blogspot.co.uk/
http://jnestorstudentblog.tumblr.com/