A/V: SIGHTS & SOUNDS

Aesthetics are obviously super important for us, they are our most direct method of communicating the concept, the mechanics, the themes and the narrative... and perhaps most significantly, the vibe.

.

The slideshow above will give you a sense of this new project's still-evolving visual style. As well, here is a song created many years ago by Scntfc, it includes a monlogue by Carl Sagan and it creates a beautifully contemplative space. This song, or something like it, will eventually find its way into this project and the vibe that it creates is an inspiration. Here is another recording from Scntfc created for this project, this one captures some of the brightness, awe, scope and wonder that we're after. Please keep those sounds safe, they are 'for internal use only'.

Sights                                                                      

The new look is built on strategically stylized surfacing and materials, naturalistically proportioned but elegantly simplified shapes, with an emphasis on motion, cinematography, lighting, atmospherics and lens effects.

.

It'll take a ton of ingeunuity and clever decision-making to be able to flesh out this world, as a tiny team we have no choice but to work smart, as brute force won't get us to where we need to be. Consequently we'll be looking into the creation of various world creation tools to help carve out rivers, shape coastlines, seed forests and shape landscapes and stake out ecosystems. Procedurality on its own won't solve all of our problems, many man-made objects and locations will have to be handcrafted. It's a tall order, and we know it'll take a fair amount of time and experimentation, but in general we feel ok about our chances on this one. We have a history with 3-D and several years of videogame industry experience as an artist and designer using a tool similar to Unity, and our prototyping so far has given us some cause for confidence, so we think our ambitious-yet-cautious approach will see us through. There are some other common timesinks that we hope to sidetep, for example we'll be designing the project with the goal of minimizing or avoiding human character animation and rigging, we'll avoid cutscenes, and we'll move towards a surfacing style that doesn't involve UV unwrapping and custom textures.

.

This look will need to be scaleable and clean enough to be appealing and coherent on smaller displays and economical enough to maintain a high frame rate even on older machines, but we'll also need just enough detail density to properly fill out a much larger canvas, be it a television, a computer display, a projector in a theatre, or even stereoscopic virtual reality goggles like Oculus Rift. 

.

This project is pretty much all about 3-D space, we're creating it with the affordable all-in-one videogame-making software Unity from Unity Technologies.

.

One of the constraints is that the player will be able to look at the world from a range of perspectives and altitudes, going from walking around in caves, corridors and hangars and looking at the world from a human scale, and then the player will hop into their scout ship and careen around at various altitudes with a camera following as if in a helicopter... and it'll even be possible for the player to rocket up into the sky and look down.

.

Hopefully our style will be lean, mean and clean... and as distinctive and identifiable as Sword & Sworcery in its own way.

Sounds                                                                                                                              

On the music side of things we're talking with Scntfc about an approach that will match this earnest, wide-eyed, no-nonsense tone. We'll be avoiding catchy melodies, funky beats, badass synths and anything remotely prog rock. Instead we are looking at creating a musical language built out of hushed, thrumming strings as well as harps, bells, an occasional trumpet or horn, with any synth elements employed to create an underlying vibe of awe, wonder, mystery and menace. We have been talking at length about the score to the Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line and a few songs from Prometheus, and we've spoken a fair bit about Metroid Prime and Skyrim. We're fortunate in that we have plenty to refer to in Scntfc's own stellar discography, including two profoundly inspiring compositions that include a monologue by Carl Sagan.