Ah, July in New England. The heat, the humidity. Sometimes it feels like you can swim to your car instead of walking the air is so thick with moisture. It’s a great time to be thinking about The Underswamp and who (and
what) lives there…
The Evolution of a Lizardman
Fans of
Ultima Underworld often remember the Lizardman race pretty fondly. They were spotlighted in one of most signature moments of that game, where the player was able to learn their language.
They were later feared to be wiped out in the cataclysmic events of that game, but in
Underworld Ascendant, you’ll see they make their return.
In it, a group of Green Lizardmen reside in the neutral city of Marcaul, a central trading point for The Stygian Abyss.
We’ve explored multiple looks for the Lizardmen over the past year and thought we’d share.
We started with a couple of different versions during the Kickstarter: A dinosaur-like take and one that loosely resembled a fishman from H.P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. We even had a vote on which one the fanbase liked more. There was a healthy debate in the office, too.
After some time evolving in art direction of the game, we needed to come back around on how all of our creatures looked. Nate and the art team have been taking a new look at what the Lizardman might appear in this developing style.
Nate’s a guy who likes to feel what he’s making, so the initial investigation into the style started with actual sculpts. The idea from there is to figure out how to replicate the sculpt in a 3D program and to experiment on what granularity to make the objects.
There’s been much debate about the style, mostly the shininess of the materials, which we’ve been continuing to experiment with. What we were most concerned about was getting a made-by-hand look to the world. If you notice with the roughness, it’s all bold cuts and indents made to be read from any distance. The details are there, but in bold strokes instead of fine granularity. With this style, it’s the imperfections that end up giving the character.
Notice for example on the wall piece, the upper border how the stones are all not equal and really only have a small flourish on each one to make it look normal and natural.
Nate and team have continued with this idea of having a tactile sculpt for the creatures and characters.
Although just clay, this is the first look at a Green Lizardman, the friendlier of the types you’ll encounter.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for refinement, which will be handled during the modeling and texturing process over the coming weeks and months.
But, what about
Red Lizardmen?
Since they’re a closely related species, we didn’t want to deviate too drastically from the basic look. But as game developers we need to accomplish a few things when doing a separate species that is essentially the same. We’ve all seen this in games , the reds and the blues, the big and the little. In a 3d FPS game the silhouette is very important. Like spotters on ships in WWII being able to identify a silhouette at a distance can be the difference between life or death.
Probably the best example of this in video games is
Team Fortress 2. Its developers worked extremely hard to let the player be able to identify a class almost instantly.
We need to address the same problem and being a world of light and shadow, color is not always going to be an option as the identifier for us.
To address this with the Red Lizardmen, we decided to adjust his shape slightly in bulk and to give them some easy-to-read attachments that Green Lizardmen don’t have.
In the early study (above), you’ll notice the frills on the Red’s head and face… which Will wants to call it a “head sail” and Tim a “scalp tongue”.
Another part we use to accent the silhouette is with armor and clothing.
In Nate’s draw-over (on the right), he’s added some feather attachments making it even more sharp and pointy-looking from a distance.
Now that the overall idea is agreed upon, the Red Lizardman is in the hands of art production and refinements continue to happen daily.
In future installments, we’ll dig deeper into detailing how the visual differences between the races translate into telegraphing skills, abilities, and other matters of gameplay.
In Other News…
As you’re well aware, our friends at Night Dive Studios are running a Kickstarter in support of their modern revitalization of
System Shock. The project in its final few days, fully funded and approaching some interesting stretch goals, so don’t forget to
check it out.
Also, today, Tuesday, July 26th, the team at Night Dive will be running a System Shock Twitch session and our own Tim Stellmach, Warren Spector, and Paul Neurath (who all worked on the original game) are joining in.
It begins at Night Dive’s Twitch channel
https://www.twitch.tv/nightdivestudios/profile at 1:00 PST/3:00 Central/4:00 EST.
Until next time!
Best,
Team Otherside
