Paint It Black: The Art of 'Sea of Solitude'

[Music] hi um my name is connie and i'm the writer art and creative director of my game studio called you my recreated the story-driven adventure called sea of solitude which i will talk about today i will give you a short introduction about my background so you see how it all influenced like sea of solitude i started my career and was 17 at the biggest german comic house in berlin drawing for their monthly comic series and as i have loved video games like since i was a child um as soon as the first games academy opened up in berlin my chosen hometown um i applied and successfully got an internship and

became a game designer um i work mainly as an art director in the games industry up until i founded my own company of yomai together with boris monza one of my best friends sea of solitude is our first multiple platform title the first big 3d game we made and the first story driven game we are so proud that we finished it at all with like the small 12 people team we had been back then our vision was when humans get too lonely they turn into monsters um and first i want to show you how that looks like

is this real [Music] this world that i live in is empty and cold the loneliness cuts me and torches my soul i'm no child of destiny and no fortune son i've just chased you so long now i'm too weak to run a new day is here but nothing is new alone in my room i tremble for you

so um today i will talk about the art direction of sea of solitude in depth i will often use the acronym like sos um so just so you know i don't cry out for help when i say that i'm going to talk about how emotions informed and inspired the visual style of the game we will cover a lot of ground looking at how the style of sos is heavily influenced by emotions what aspect we're important when building our version for berlin what makes our bezel so special and why the monsters look like they do and how limitations inspire features so in sos you play a woman named kaylee

who suffers from such strong loneliness that her inner feelings that the anger feeling of hopelessness worthlessness turned to the outside and she becomes a monster on her journey to become human again she one by one meets her family members uh who each suffer from different kinds of loneliness and become monsters too first i want to talk about the general idea that became the base of like um everything uh and influenced every area of art and design we wanted to make a game where we would um start from one emotion and build like everything around it literally turning the inside the inner feeling out k is basically a representation of me

and the past i went through to overcome my struggles i wanted to share my journey and form of a game if we look at her we see a black void as if someone like spilled like ink or over like the otherwise colorful painting her presence on the screen uh is a personified void if you will um we present a representative uh for the loneliness and hopelessness of her situation i can tell you from the feedback we got after the release and the massive um inspiration at room from real life experience that on one side this approach to develop a game um yeah it's one of the biggest chances like from personal uh uh background then the

biggest chance to to be artistically unique and successful but it's also one of the biggest risks um for the development of a game um as you constantly sometimes like for years um need to deal with this topic so um drawing your game story from your own life can be very tough seeing kay every day meant being confronted with my personal struggles at work every day so basically i always had my baggage with me mechanically and artistically i wanted a an iconic gadget on case back that represents this feeling of emotional ballast which key isn't processing in a healthy way in the game you put manifested like struggles or worries in this backpack to clear the environment of it as a game like progresses this backpack

gets bigger and bigger until it bursts open and overwhelmingly and all at once with the struggles she put in there and causing her her to have a nervous breakdown the backpack also serves as a visual help to spot kill even in the darker areas of the game my chosen narrative perspective was not just literally uh telling and showing you what happened but putting it all in a metaphorical world so people could make up um their own mind put in their own thoughts and past into sea of solitude another cornerstone um of sos is my artistic background as my king i started my career as a comic artist and i'm in general a huge comic fan my first big comic book had been the

manga akira i especially love the the comic styles semi-realism so not completely realistic but like a mixture between like for example up here and i tried to put it into sea of solitude too um so the last corner stone is my origin i was born and grew up in a fishing village directly on the shore my family had been fishermen ah still fishermen um so swimming boat driving the seagulls water are very common for me it's where i'm from those points um the metaphorical narrative perspective of my personal story partly my professional background and the law for comics and me growing up directly on the shore had been the base for all artistic decisions let's start with the environment art the

story of solitude plays out in case mind that means that what she goes through in real life we see through her inners for the setting i chose berlin the city where i live now for 20 years already um i tried to make a more romanticized version of berlin um for example like the japanese artists portray germany often like in ghibli movies like a kiki's delivery service here as an example um so we partly took original places from berlin and we modded it for sea of solitude one example is above ground subway station called bulowstrasse here is the in-game version you see um and here is the original in-game original um

we reduced the detail like to a minimum necessary to to fit our style but still kept the most prominent details to keep it recognizable the overboarding feeling um kay has throughout the majority of the game is isolation and that she is desperate to try and connect with people with these basic emotions of her i decided um that the city should look like and yeah it should look as empty as possible no really no sign of life above the water like even plants are missing i didn't uh want to show um a post-apocalyptic setting which would have washed out the metaphorical meaning so it's a normal modern clean city it's just empty as if the people just vanished from one

second to the next um what we did so was putting everywhere on the ground uh um sand and to enhance the feeling of an ocean so here you can see um some signs of disruption uh in the far corner and so only the outer circle of the city looks like this the further away you get from the center of the mind okay and of the city the houses begin to like vanish or like crumble down and begin to sink and uh into the ocean and eat the streets and trains are damaged if you will um throughout the prototyping phase we encountered an interesting challenge berlin berlin's houses include like rooftops and walls are easy are like problematic uh for interesting level design compared

for example to new york city um if you look at it here like these the houses in berlin have rather like clean design and like nothing besides balconies stick out of the walls like very much no no acs or outer fire escapes and we germans rarely put advertising posters on top of buildings or something so all of these things that are often seen in on american households are missing in berlin so on top of the these design issues uh we germans grew up with um a ton of american media like being movies music comics like it almost feels like home to us because we are constantly like having it in uh in the media how america looks like and what they are

doing so um so it almost feel like feels like home but it isn't our home so it took us quite a while to create an explorable a gameplay like explorable architecture that still looks like somehow like berlin so we basically extrude it like everything more than it is in reality um here are like some examples like this flat to typical berlin house wall um so so we extruded it so light and shadow display would be a bit more intense so that that but also most important that the households and the rooftops become explorable pathways so the constant i'm sorry for the image here um the constant urge to put in american architecture had been quite big um but we soon saw that even when we accidentally

um put just one detail like a typical the type of iconic american rooftop water tanks which you see on the right and suddenly our complete effort to portray a european city had been destroyed so another basic design for me is less is more and to achieve a distinctive sea of solitude environment art i tried um to design it with as few like details as possible um but still like every detail needed in there to make the architecture believable for me to make architecture believable the most important aspect together to feel right is to understand is its function and to include the aspects that are needed

to put and hold it into the place where it's meant to be so a tiny example is like the balcony railings the metal plate that is tied to the wall with the boltings to hold like the construction in place or something that i wanted the artist to add this little thing while other parts like decoration and aspects could be reduced to a minimum we applied okay we applied everything i said to circa sorika to exactly 159 unique buildings at least 90 of these buildings were used at least twice or up to four times we visited like twice or up to four times within the whole game which made the design of the city and the polishing so challenging with only one 3d artist beside me one extra 3d

others and two two level designers um so and i actually now more in detail we come now to the biggest topic of the whole production water so um i love games very much where i constantly roam in the same environment and so it it's more memorable like if it starts feeling like home like rather than evil or dark souls or gone home like some examples so when i did the first level design sketches i tried to apply um what i call the spaghetti level design so you come back um always to the same area again or off into the same area again to different perspectives in our case the difference perspectives are like rising and lowering the water level so it was a key to that um yeah and uh i it also became

one of the most like unique features for the sos art the art wise but also like the gameplay and the water is like um the biggest symbol we we have in the game uh you're literally walking or swimming through a flooded world and this flooded wood is like flooded by the main character's tears so um her very own ocean of tears from the very beginning i wanted to yep there's a water to feel like cozy uh as cozy as possible and clear as if you look into a swimming pool but even with without realistic like refraction so that you sense that is that it is no real water but might have a different meaning um the clearness combined with a spaghetti level design let you see areas under water

um the water surface that you like later in the game will have access to here are some crappy examples uh some examples of the water settings um that we could adjust like wave speed or wave height foam color foam distortion foam the fork underwater like we could like uh um yeah regulate every every everything else is uh every of these aspects the key design rule i gave to my environment artist was i want the sos environment to look like a holiday destination with many islands and gentle beaches it took us a while uh to find the right like angle uh and color of the rooftops so they are

really giving you that beach feeling while it's still looking like rooftops like like a lot of room normally are like this in berlin and we have like to find the angle that it's almost looked like the beach but still like the berlin rooftops it was really a challenge but interesting and both those aspects combined like the clear water the spaghetti level design and the beach feeling of the rooftops are one of the key elements of the distinctive environment art of sea of solitude and i knew we had several heavy topics uh uh we talked uh about an sos so i felt like giving the game a lighthearted visual appeal as often yeah as possible was really important and essential and that it's it's that we don't flock the player with negative feelings all the time from all

angles like everywhere so this is what's really important to me to achieve that light-hearted feeling to compensate for those happy topics uh we have a strong color color palette with many different weathers um so we try to achieve that same as the water height um is affected by the emotions of kay the weather is also affected by her mood and connected to her um so from very early on it became clear that the sunny weather that represents the feeling of positivity and adventuredness needs to be uh present as often as possible when we make the first roadmap of color schemes based on the emotion k is going through in the game there was

way too much darkness and i remember how um yeah play testing made us almost feel like depressed as the sad story and the sad color gene um over a long period was just it was just way too much so i started to try to give the negative weathers like the rainy weather for example and where the huge underwater creature is lurking a more positive wipe of colors especially especially for the water and i try to give the water um uh the look looks scary i tried to make it look like less scary by making it appear to glow um from the depth um i made the background i made the background fork lighter than the close by and um i gave it a bit more purple and blue and as uh

it would have initially yeah it was important to put it in to help calm the tense feeling so in the second level i wanted to portray the heated situation between the parents of kay and the boiling suppressed anger of them both of the parents it was clear red was the main color of choice here but um same as in the rainy weather we mixed we needed to mix some more calming colors such as yellow and brown into the sheen the glowing effect of the water being able to see far and clear what's going on beneath the water surface was important again to fight against the the too intense feeling of the story portrayed in that level was really important that we

edited and as you can see um in level two and three um the water and uh and the sky are covering much more of the screen and really like drowning the city in their colors uh because the water level has risen so much in these levels uh already so as often as possible possible we put sunny weather parts into the game to let the player relax uh before we push them into like tension again this color scheme of the boyfriend's level had been the easiest to achieve like we show someone who hides his depression behind appearing like totally fine and happy and healthy showing this whole city of the game and suddenly suddenly under a sick fluffy white snow cover was fitting

perfectly to the mood we wanted to transport so this all-white and cozy feelings came right before the final level our main characters finally face her own issues um portraying a breakdown the absolute feeling of being completely alone and numb it was clear i wanted to have it as dark and black as possible no colors dense fork so i hope you can see anything here um in general we had many issues with our main color black in the game how dark can you like uh turn the game before it becomes hard to watch or uh or understand where you are um a huge issue is the many different monitors we needed to adjust the game colors too i always

wanted to go as dark as possible but when we tested the game uh on another pc it was often like simply pitch black we present prevented total navigational loss of the player by adding two things one uh was um a subtle light source around k and so the player could always um see what is around them the second important help was again to make the background fork lighter than the foreclosed by so you have the silhouette we said you can always see like this silhouette of the surrounding like uh clearing with with which functions as landmarks with those tricks i could finally have my pitch black parts to so one of the the biggest challenges when

we created um tea of solitude had been our manpower like um creating a game of that size with a team of 12 made us come up with like unique design processes um as mentioned before i i had been not only the art director but also the main game designer had was a level design level design sketches and level i did some level art with one other level artist beside um and had other responsibilities like the company had and so in the first years of the concept phase i just had one programmer helping me with like um solitude and we needed to work on other games too that kept like the company afloat while we were finding the right appropriation of solitude so it was like a really uh just two two people team at the

beginning me and one programmer so i basically just had time to do one key artwork for the environment art at the beginning so i did it in my favorite 2d tool like photoshop adobe photoshop i usually work with like many layers in photoshop and often use like the color and so-called blending modes uh for those layers like multiply like overlay and transparency i use transparency gradients and masks i love using all this for my my my style so when i finished then one key at work i walked up to my one programmer and showed him exactly how i made it this key artwork in photoshop and asked him if if if he can reproduce this in unity as a tool

for 3d environment so that he creates something in unity that i can work the same way i would work in 2d photoshop because of the tiny team size we early on decided to not use any textures um in the environment so even like cracks on the wall um and the leaves are triangles and that had been a huge advantage as we didn't needed to unwrap anything or or texture and we could scale and squeeze the models freely we also didn't um need to spend time creating textures as mentioned and because of this we could build almost a whole city district like a real city district was just one environment artist

me um so to bring life um to the the untreatable environment i asked my programmer for various tools to help me coloring the shadow and ambient occlusion was really important that i could like really color it what however i want we also misused the specular component of the materials in unity and used just slightly different colors within this specular gradient so when you move through the word of sos this effects brings more life into the world without you really noticing it it makes sos look less blunt and that was a really um cool step um i feel um

so uh i used the gradient in photoshop to create like distance fork and also ground fork like for the this concept art i did so the specialty in sos had been that i needed fork over and under water but the fog over water shouldn't affect the uh everything underwater white and vice versa so our program at work step-by-step built me a vessel system tool in unity where i could almost use the same workflow i had in photoshop with that i didn't need to spend time painting artworks but i could directly build a one-to-one example for my whole team where they didn't need to interpret my drawings but could see like the final product and use that as a blueprint for everything they needed to create create

and see of solitude so remember we were only 12 people we need to iterate it reiterate fast and if you do um the same i advise you to build tools that makes you as flexible as possible so um that brings me to the second biggest art direction aspects next to the environment art the monster design in general we have two different types of monsters in sos case monsters and the monsters of the family of k all of them are based on the human behind it mixed with the biggest emotion they have these aspects manifest into their monster form so when i did the very first sketch of a

monster definitely of solitude i sat down in front of a blank paper and i imagined like how i uh would feel like and yeah and when i'm at absolute lowest point like angry and sad so i rather scratch like over the paper and and then drawing like anything particular and a black ball of lines um that came out of the session so i i started to bring like this basic idea of how manifested anger and sadness could look like into a human form and while doing so um the wired lines uh i turn slowly into a feathery fur um then i imagine that in order to still go on in life not giving up even though you go through all these hardships you need to still have

a flame of hope like burning um inside you so i drew this is monster with with monsters with red uh with a red orange light like shining from the inside out and through their mouths and through the eyes and this is the base of all monsters um you encounter in the game uh a black appearance with red shining eyes and mouth a short comment before i go deeper into the family monster designs this the stories and the story about the parents and about the brother are not taking from my life i have no brother and my parents are now happily married for uh over 40 years 40 years and so those stories are inspired by colleagues and friends

and the brother monster had been um the first family monster i did a concept out of the brother gets bullied in school um by his their former friends and he suffers from harsh self-doubt like unsure for a long time if he if he is a problem in this whole issue and so the longer he is in the situation the stronger his buddies are harassing him and the first uh of the strongest emotion um he has is like this urge to just want to fly away from this situation like the birds he used to watch through um the school windows during lessons um this is why his monster version appears like a huge bird in particular a raven

mixed with a human body he is constantly surrounded constantly surrounded by his own weather which reflects his emotions too the second emotion next to the urge to fly away is uh fear to be seen he wants to hide because his body start harassing him as soon as they see him and so i created a sick fork around him almost colorless where he hides in inside his water is special as it is the only one where you can instantly die as mentioned before the water stands for the ocean of tears desperation sadness so his emotional state is already so bad that we decided to make this water deadly

and when cape falls into that like water hands like of the bodies of struck grab her and drown her [Music] the father of kay is pondering for a long time already to want to leave his wife as they married rather early in their life and just grew apart they tried over many years to fix the marriage but sometimes it just it just didn't work out and the longer they tried uh the unhealthy as a whole situation became as he the father struggles to openly tell his wife what he feels and rather avoid confrontation he starts hiding from her by working way too much so i drew his monster version as a big chameleon mixed with a human

i wanted to show um with little details like that he is still wearing his wedding ring um even as a monster that he he loves his family we encounter him first on the skyscraper where his office is i wanted that the building looks almost destroyed the father monster and the mother monster fighting for a long while already she tried to get him out of this skyscrapers and with this she destroyed it almost also i designed the interior of the building i i had the idea for the design of the interior building as rather empty and cold and same as the father feels he sits on top of the building angry angrily crying out his screams produce steam streams

that comes out of every red vent inside the skyscraper and push scale the player away he is the father monster tries to avoid touching the water the ocean of tears like the plaque as he is unwilling to really deal with his own issues he can't even swim the mother monster looks like a giant octopus mixed with a female head she is about 10 times a lot bigger than the father monster um i imagined like a loving mother that desperately tries to hold the families of all family together tries to hold on to like everything and keep it from crumbling apart so she needed many arms and i

immediately saw it of an octopus the mother monster is of often completely underwater and that means that she is constantly worrying and sad but as soon as her daughter or husband shows up she comes out of the water and at least try to appear confident the mother monster and father monster share a huge weather surrounding them um so we have this dramatic like red and orange colors throughout most of their level it stands for the end of their partnership but also the heated tension surrounding them the water level is much higher than in the brothers level beforehand uh as both like the mother and the father suffer from a profound loneliness within their relationship that affects the whole family including

their children the final argument those two have in the destroyed version of the home and game it looks like a bomb crater i hope you can see that in the concept um when the player comes to the home at first it's still intact and it's also the only place next to the end of the game where you see plants and vegetation plants and vegetation in general it stands for that kay feels most healthy there at her home so she can see the life which she can't even throughout most of the game so you can see it there um so uh the monster the boyfriend monster is the most unique one of all

family monsters kay's boyfriend suffers from depression but tries to appear fine to the outside he is doing it pretty well until he falls in love with kay and is finally forced to open up about his struggles so when we meet the boyfriend monster first he appears like a shiny white wolf like white lone wolf throughout the development the whole development of solitude i educate myself about mental health a lot but also about metaphors symbols and so on the lone wolf is a typical symbol for a man that tends to act independently and spend more time alone than in groups and it is not only him i portray shiny and white in his level the whole berlin district where sos takes place is

snowed in and he is like really really good at camouflaging his real feelings so he put the whole game under a cozy white snow layer um so every time he interacts with k in the game um and she touches him part of his white perfect camouflage falls off and we see the black dog beneath it which is a known metaphor for depression i again designed him part human and part animal k the main character itself i wanted to portray portray in different and in a different way and as ripped apart into her basic emotions all of this emotions coming to life and she needs to interact with them throughout the entire game

i took her strongest emotion emotions like self-doubt joy self-destruction hope and willpower the playable character represents willpower okay the willpower she looks much more like a human and than every other monster as she is closest to recover but of course i wanted like to design um the main character more human so the player can project themselves better onto it and so mk is actually completely naked which was important to me to portray how vulnerable she is in the state of uh change and a transition to a more healthy life the only thing kay wears is her backpack it carries um the baggage we all carry throughout our life she um doesn't know how to cope with

these all these emotions um she is going through so um this is the backpack like becomes bigger and bigger and throughout the game until it's like really huge at birth and forcing her to finally overcome her own struggles or all deal with all her emotions saved out is the first other monster you meet uh to really interact with and meet in the game um all of case monsters are partly her human body like uh so um self doubt i choose to mix her with um like the human body and with a snail like especially with a shell and self-doubt as an emotion always feels uh to me and as it ends up trying to hide somewhere like it's hiding self-doubt in your height

mostly of course at home so if a snail shell is in their homes their home the self-doubt monster um also has teeth like a small child and i wanted to show that um what comes out of the mouth of a self-doubt is not nothing educated or um but rather like blunt or wrong so but often true but no so more shy like the self-doubt monster shrinks over the course of the game until she turns from like self-doubt to healthy doubt so first she is house high and super scary uh um so at the end of the game kate can't even take her in her arms she's like a baby that this helps it out in size

self-destruction is a mixture between kaylee and a siren and a shark like she tries to lurk k back into the water and to the ocean of tears so she can so so she can swallow okay again when i started scribbling her she was rather soft at the beginning of self-destruction and a whale like a whale um but the more her role um became clear like the main antagonist and the representation of self-destruction and then she more turned like to turn into a super creepy being and with this huge sharp teeth you see um okay so uh just her torso yeah just her torso and that her eyes are in front of her of the head and not on the side reminds us that there is uh also some

human part in it if you look really closely you can see that the feet of k's body meld together to form a fin in this monster and she is always like under water the ocean of tears is her natural habitat so um self-destruction same as self-doubt also um shrinks throughout the game so that k can almost lift uh even self-destruction at the end um self-destruction is probably the monster you see the most on the internet the way she behaves and so the way she swims is something we are very proud of um because it needed so much work to get it right and so much attention with complex collision checks to to turn her around like this the snaker animation that gives her like this sign

curve style so much work um so joy joy we yeah we put joy in the category of monster even though she doesn't appear that way at the beginning and is rather special in general i think of joy uh as a rather innocent feeling in a sense i connect with a childhood so i choose to draw joy as a child version of k and she wears a yellow raincoat so she is completely and vulnerable to the ocean of tears she even can fly just to be sure that she never touches like the water uh in the boyfriend a monster level joy finally shows her monstrous side um she turns into an obsession monster and attacks k when she tries to get in when k tries to get in the way between joy

and the boyfriend obsession has sharp teeth and i changed the color to purple for real better readability purposes and another entity in the game is a boat uh of k that she drives it stands for the hope of k it also carries a sunny weather wizard uh like like a sphere and which he gets like from joy at the beginning she gets a sunny weather from joy it functions as a safe zone i wanted to design the boat um in a robust but simple way um like hope itself it is not an emotion that is loud or profound and i feel it is the most important of them all the houseboat um is the new version of the family's home

so underwater you can see the broken pieces of the family home so above the box of water it is a new home in your house board that will carry all family members with k into their new chapter of life built from the old life so i i often get asked what movies like uh comic books uh books and or whatever inspired me for sea of solitude i then always try to come up with art i love but the truth is that i didn't look at any other art or any other yeah are to get inspired of solitude it came from the inside like um

otherwise like the visual i drew from everything i learned the visual like everything i learned uh so far and the style i have developed throughout my life so far for the story i just let out what i already had in my mind my feelings there had been a dangerous situation in between when i looked at other art for once too much and when the last guardian the game the last guardian came out i was so excited about it and that i almost studied like this design of trico of this huge animal in the game at the same time back then i was still designing the monsters of sos and at um some point my co-workers came to me and said like connie and your monster design looks so different now almost like trico it was like a little bit like a shock as

i didn't realize this until the moment they told me about it like oh um gladly i still could revert the damage back then i have done so what i learned through the whole production um of sos be it for the art the story or every um creative uh process draw from what it's is inside you then it will have the biggest chance to be unique adore others art but be careful to not adapt it accidentally um i i stopped looking at others art too much at some point and and i think this is why is your solitude became a bit more unique from now on i will always follow the path of first looking inside me

take the strongest emotion or thought i have at the point in my life and use that as a base for the for the art or the games i want to create this way it will likely have the personality have personality and will be unique and i think that is the key we all all the artists out there want to achieve thank you [Music]