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What’s most exciting about this design renaissance, though, is the range of visions and styles represented around the city—due in part, perhaps, to the constant flow of new residents from around the country and world. Design scene is equally embracing of the primitive and the cutting-edge, the refined with the unrefined,” says Adam Blackman of Blackman Cruz, on Highland Avenue. Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games. These ideas, the moon and purity also carry with them something feminine, in fact, they obsess over the image of a maiden dancing in front of the moon and strive to capture this beauty. The Brass Armour's appearance and indeed, the appearance of Gwyndolin himself can be attributed to this. I'm sure made the designers and programmers really angry because I forced them to make his armour equippable.
Catarina Armour and Siegmeyer of Catarina
Nakamura designed the knight's armour from Demon's Souls and it was such a great design that it actually gave us trouble when it came to trying to improve it. There were several times where we took it in entirely wrong directions, or when it started to look like an inferior copy, rather than an improvement. In cases where I had a clearer idea of what I wanted, the design process was slightly different. For example, this is going to be used in this place to perform this function or, the area is designed in this way so it must adhere to these conditions, for example the mimic and the gargoyles. Regardless of which design process was used, rather than to appoint a person to take charge of each concept, I took the designs and talked them over with each of the artists and developed them in that way. Design Works is a modest little book that mostly delivers environments and characters with little exposition.
Gwynevere
It’s 12 pages altogether (with tiny print to boot), and pretty in-depth. It’s from December 2011, but it’s still pretty insightful, and sheds a few facts like how bosses are created (unlike the rest of the project, these are apparently done in isolation with a singular artist in charge of a boss), and how each map and layout was achieved. Scribble Pad Studios provides full service illustration work for marketing, advertising, packaging, card art and book/novel covers. A few of our previous works can be seen on WOTC (Magic the Gathering), Heaven's War book series and packaging art for various video games and film projects. Scribble Pad Studios offers full service design work for all platforms in the video game industry including initial ideation and bluesky, production art and services, 3d assets and turn-arounds. Our focus is within all realms of environment design, character design and props & weapons.
A clear vision. A simple mission. We design systems that impact and improve the world we live in.
Sadly, a few areas are erroneously marked in the process to localize the book, like the case of the Mimic (a treasure chest monster) and the Serpent Mage, who are mismatched. Bosses are shown off in all their glory however, and the art for foes like the Four Kings is phenomenal. One animation that I'll always remember is when the play activates the Dragon Torso Stone.
Dark Souls, one of the most widely acclaimed video games of the last two decades - perhaps all time - and progenitor of one of modern video gaming’s most influential and oft-copied-rarely-bettered genres, the Soulslike, would’ve been a better game had it launched into early access. That’s the suggestion from the head of Ori and the Blind Forest developers Moon Studios in the wake of launching their own early access Soulslike, No Rest For The Wicked. That may surprise some you and we certainly encountered difficulties because the team was so small, but I also believe that there are things that could only be achieved by a small team like this. It was difficult to balance and as artists I'm sure you'd prefer to tighten up your own designs so I'm sorry that you weren't able to. By the time I began thinking about Solaire's character I had already decided that I was going to use it for the Sunlight Warriors covenant. I remember I actually acted the pose out so the artist could take pictures.
At that point, we were much more experienced working on mech games like Armoured Core and I think that lack of experience with fantasy games hindered us a little but there are things I really like about it. Seath's scene or the part where Nito raises his hands are my favourites, I think they came together really well. Anyway, onto the designs we created in-house, what do you think of them? When we were initially discussing the design, we came up with the theme of greed.
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I actually acted the motion out for the animators but when they showed me the finished animation, I didn't like it. "He wouldn't move like this" I said, to which they replied, "but this is how you showed us, I'm sure of it", and of course everyone agreed with them. I was a bit embarrassed, but that awkward, jerky motion actually conveys what it would be like if a human was trying to force him or herself to become a dragon, so in the end, after some slight adjustments, I gave it the "OK". It was actually a very difficult period of time for me, I was determined to have something substantial before I showed my designs to Mr. Miyazaki, to be able to explain my choices and defend them if needed. I worked on them intensively for a long time before I was finally ready to show them to anyone.
You would expect designs based around this theme to be either fat or have a huge mouth, but that's a little too predictable. When I saw the design I was genuinely surprised and absolutely delighted. It's Logan's goal to gain the power of the ancient dragons, so in order to do this, I had an image of him casting off his human clothes. It's similar to using the Dragon Head or Torso Stone, you have to remove your equipment. Of course there are gameplay reasons for this too, but there was also this image of the player leaving something of their humanity behind.
The Art of The Creator: Designs of Futures Past
Our studio has developed for Universal, Disney CA, Disney Epcot and various groups within S. The majority of the people in the Dark Souls world follow the Way of the White or Gwyn and the Sunlight Warriors covenant, but there is another, far more secretive group who follow Gwndolin and the Dark Moon. They have developed in almost complete isolation, so their customs and traditions are also completely different. In the end they never were, the four knights disappeared and the design work for knights A and B was transferred to other characters like Ornstein and Artorias. I'm extremely fond of the design so I wanted to do something special, turn him from one of four knights into something almost… heretical.
The Capra Demon's head is an example of this, it gives a sense of ceremony and long-held tradition, which in turn hints at a developed culture. Details such as this can really improve designs by giving them a significance not present at first sight. Symbols contain inherent meaning, they wouldn't be symbols if they didn't, but it's difficult to add new meaning to that symbol. Having said that, I tried to bring out all the artists' individual styles because I think working closely with each designer to develop their ideas whilst still embracing their personal style creates a much richer, organic feeling world in the end.
As for the art, most fans will be able to recognize obvious bosses like the Gaping Dragon, but there’s a tiny bit of text next to each character to identify them. Despite hitting most of the major facets of the game, what the book decides to focus on is uneven, as some minor creations get a lot of love like Havel the Rock (who sports a full page), but others like Frampt get one tiny box. It’s all hypothetical, of course, and Mahler himself tackles the suggestion that a longer development cycle is the obvious solution - ie. Studios simply having “the funds to finish the game and release it then” - by saying that’s viewing “a complex problem through a way too simple lens”. These themes, along with utilising the artists' personal styles, formed the basis of the Dark Souls design principle. In contrast to most art teams, we didn't have our artists concentrating on a specific section, instead all the artists contributed to all areas.
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As I mentioned earlier, each artist began with just a few simple "image words" and developed their designs from that. The words which inspired each of their designs and the way they chose to use them was very different. Some found that relatively philosophical words gave them ideas while some used them to develop a character's back story. Each collaboration was different and because of that, each was stimulating in its own way. I think this is the main reason that the world of Dark Souls turned out as well as it did.
Similarly, Logan removing his clothes is his attempt to bring himself closer to Seath in some way. Although I couldn't take his hat off because no one would recognise him, but personally I like to think that unlike the followers of the path of the Dragon, Logan sought to gain the dragons power while retaining his pride as a human. It’s a bit puzzling and might be because it’s the only bit of artwork they could get their hands on for the book, but you should be prepared to be underwhelmed by some of the inclusions.
I've worked with Mr Nakamura for a long time on both Armoured Core and Demon's Souls, and have always trusted him with the most important designs. I've also worked with Mr. Satake since Armoured Core, and on this project he worked with the out-of-house artists which basically meant he had to translate my abstract directions into something they might understand. Still, I’d worry there’s a slippery slope in implying every big game could benefit from early access (to give due credit, Mahler only says “some games” would benefit) - especially a game like Dark Souls that deliberately revels in often cryptic and downright unforgiving game design. Those divisive elements can be hit-and-miss, sure, but they’re also the kind of risky decisions that can lead to games outside of the mould. As such, they’re often assumed to be everyone’s least favourite part of the game and the objectively ‘worst’ area - though they may have a close competitor in the dark, poisonous Blighttown, especially in its original framerate-tanking form.
Very much like creating the cities in Armored Core, it's much easier for the planners, designers and 3D artists to start with references from real life than to start from scratch. Real things contain such a mixture of influences, ideas and such an abundance of information, that I wanted to try using this technique in Dark Souls. Of course, some things worked out better than others, but I think in the end we created something that wouldn't have been possible if we started from zero. Even with the areas that didn't turn out as I'd hoped, it was a pretty successful experiment.
One area I was particularly disappointed in is the lack of unused material, or art we haven’t seen before in some fashion. Flipping through the hardcover guide that launched with the game, I noticed that a lot of the same pieces were re-used, so I was really looking forward to the concept art. There’s some interesting unused areas and characters to ogle at but not much. Poor Artorias (one of my favorite characters) is lumped in this section, before he ended up heading up his own DLC campaign. In many ways it's the complete opposite of the Catarina armour but the set which best embodies Dark Souls' dark fantasy aesthetic and which was consequently featured on the box art is the Elite Knight armour. I actually showed her the knight's armour from Demon's Souls to use as reference and asked her to enhance it by adding features that weren't present in the initial design, such as the surcoat.
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