Design Spec

­Design Document

The Kings of Vi

(Working title)

Scott Bennett

Game Art and Design Year Three

Introduction

The King has been betrayed, his power divided; the quest to recover it lies at your feet.

The Kings of Vi (working title) is a story inspired by Norse legend focusing on the character of a young prince. At the barest bones of it: A powerful artefact is lost where you the hero must find it and in doing so become powerful.

This is a coming of age story where the hero develops from a young boy, all the way to adulthood where the King's power is a metaphor for mature attributes found in, but not limited to, adults; such as responsibility, control (managing emotions) and patience – which a child coming of age will have to seek out and face.  In order to obtain the divided power the player is tested in the form of boss fights and morale choices.  Despite the story being about coming of age and the child hero becoming a man, the visual look of the character will be a man for a large portion of the story, this is to imply that just because you look like an adult, it doesn't mean you are done learning and developing.

The power itself is divided amongst several villains who will be dealt with throughout the game and further the development of the protagonist.

Target

With world-building there is such a plethora of interesting and exciting ideas to choose from, yet I have always loved creating my own characters and giving them their own stories; therefore for my final project, I will be focusing on three characters on their own little set-piece to make them look like little ornaments that you can turn around to view.

Visual Style

As it is a coming of age story and therefore aimed at a younger audience (12+) the style needs to be more playful and exaggerated while not being too realistic. A large part of the story is losing that youthful innocence, so having the game start out more playful will give the player a false sense of security to which can then be taken advantage of for the first story beat where something terrible happens.

Good examples of using a playful visual style and gameplay alongside a sad and often dark story being: Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft universe, Lionhead Studio’s Fable saga and even despite the lack of colour;  Limbo by Playdead. Or even the majority of Disney movies; the older ones especially such as Lion King or Fox and the Hound.

The overall feel is to be able to read emotion without the use of dialogue which demands the faces be highly emotive and the body/silhouette showing off that characters overall personality. For example: Superman is heroic, therefore he stands in  a heroic/triumphant pose.

Technical Specification

Budget

Each character will be limited to:

15,000 triangles (excluding background elements / pedestal)

1 x 1024 x 1024 Diffuse, Normal, Specular

1 x 512 x 512 Diffuse, Normal, Specular (for the head)

1 x 512 x 512 Alpha (if required)

Characters will be modelled with arms at around 30 degrees and bent slightly (relaxed)

Rigged and posed with a simple animation to show that it can be animated effectively.

Pedestals / background elements have no triangle limit as they are for presentation purposes; however they will be consistent with the geometry level and texture density of the characters.

Here are the designs: