Void Bastards' Art Style Origin Story

[Music] hi there my name's Ben Lee I'm the art director on void bastards made by Blue Manchu today we're going to be talking about the origin stories of void bastards which is to say I'm going to try and give you some insight into what happened before we made the game in pre-production and how things change while we were making the game so the first thing we've got is a three-page comic I did early in production it wasn't the first thing we did but it was done quite early in production to help everyone in our team which is distributed or certainly was distributed for the most of most of production in I was in the UK a lot of the team was in Canberra but we also had team members in Canada and Scotland so we're sort of all over the place so in order to

communicate to everybody the the general look and feel of the game this I find this sort of brief comic book is uh so it is very useful it's a bit more narrative than just a bunch of dry stills but in this case it was very important because we decided early on that we wanted to pursue a comic book aesthetic and I'm not someone who really likes half-measures so when we went for the comic book aesthetic we all bought into the idea of we're going to try and make every part of this game look like a comic book not just a theme or were a front end or or a combat section everything was going to look like it was taking place in the pages of a comic book how successful that was is up to up to you as an audience but I was doing my best to try and make everything as comic book-like as possible so you can see in these pages that the original idea for the narrative side at least because the the gameplay didn't really change very much from what we intended from day one

however the the world and the feel of wet bastards actually changed quite radically so in these pages you can see that the initial player character wasn't a series of prisoners it was a single person and the idea was that this person when they died would actually die but would be replicated back on what has become the Steve in void Basterds but we call it the part at the time and every time this person was reincarnated they would they would pick up photocopier style errors so a gauge of how successful you'd been at the end of the game was how genetically messed up this character had become over you know in between zero and hundreds of times have been resurrected so you can see in these pages that it was a little more hard science fiction a little more near future astronaut than what we ended up with in void Basterds and that was something that only really changed I

would say about the mid point of the project I've talked about this in other interviews which was when we brought Keira Ellison on for a talented writer and we all committed to the idea of trying to make it into a black comedy as opposed to what was done in these pages which is with just a really really desperate sad tale of someone who was alone in space [Music] okay what we've got here is a very early mock-up of how we might try and do a cutscene in a comic book form and this is the one that would sort of set up and open the game that Carol and I worked on together we did decide at the end that it was far too long and consequently we reappropriation thing to look at

especially if you're a fan like I've actually really enjoyed looking at all this stuff myself this week and you can see just how different that even the tone was it was it's got elements of Cara's jokes and the Douglas Adams's influence and everything else but it isn't quite the same as what we had with what we wound up with [Music]

so to just finish off the topic of the comic book look I was talking about how everything needed to be a comic these are early concepts of how the campaign map the loadout screen and the machine map might look we didn't know at this point this was all just done in Photoshop we didn't have anything really working in the game at this time and I think you can see here that I was I was really pushing maybe beyond what was reasonable for how the interface would look like comic book panels I wanted to have panels themselves be sort of part interface and part storytelling so it was all mixed together and that never really works very well it's always confusing for people so like a lot of things I was trying to start out pushing as hard as I could to get it as comic

book as possible and then gradually make concessions to a useful user interface so I really actually kind of miss some of these little touches where there was a character's in a monologue mixed in amongst the UI elements to kind of guide you through it but I find it really interesting to look back back at these with some fondness and it's interesting that the colors were very different in these as well we hadn't come up with the idea of orgs yet the organization's which which are on the different spaceships so they're all of the wild colors that you see in the different ships I was just using all at once rather than trying to match them to particular things so the next thing I would like to talk about is the way we developed the environments which were very very important obviously you know in the sort of game that would bastard is we needed to make a lot of levels but we needed to keep the scope very manageable much as everything else in the game now this is an area we couldn't economize quite as much as in other places where for example the cutscenes

we decided to do them as largely still comic-book images because it would fit with the theme but also wouldn't require a lot of animation with environments we couldn't really do that so we had to come up with a way to make the task manageable and from my point of view it filter meted to design an art style which didn't include tons and tons of details it would be expensive or time assuming which of the same thing to create so early on we decided on a very open thin line look and I found the easiest way for me to pre-visualize this stuff was actually to use Sketchup but which is what you're seeing right now and this had the advantage of being able to do little walkthrough animations for team members who want in the room with me that I could post and they could look at in there when they woke up in their timezone and I found it very useful to be able to virtually walk around inside a space when it was still being concept

afore anyone who attempted to 3d model it this is actually the first test that I could find that we did when we were still trying to decide whether or not we could make a 3d environment game with sprites you know the old in the old school manner of outlaws and jig nukem that I'm very fond of concept being though that we could do that with high resolution textures that would look more like illustrations and less like pixelated 90s videogames and it was this clip that gave us the confidence to move forward it's interesting to me here that you can see that the already the the technology level and the look and feel was very different to what we wound up with in void Basterds we've got a very clean-looking futuristic handgun the enemies are very contemporary looking the next step was to take this rough model and to do some paint over mock-ups of how the game might look when you were really playing it now these are these

images are really interesting to me because it takes me back to where Dan we hadn't really established a unique what I would call unique look for void Basterds a lot of this really does look like animation which is it is my background before getting into games and it's it's sort of funny to see how quickly I fall back to that when I'm pushed into a corner so I liked all of this stuff and we thought it looked cool but our main concern was that it didn't look particularly unique at best it would look like good animation and at worst it would just look like I don't know bad animation you can see here - the enemy design was really nothing like what we ended up with but at this stage in the project I was kind of just stabbing in the dark it what possibilities could we have and stay tuned later on for the development of the monsters which is in itself a topic ok here is probably the first proper mock-up that I did when we decided to move forward with this idea

and at this stage I was still kind of drawing this stuff like anime and not really like like a comic book or at least it felt that way I was trying to make it look like a comic book but it kept coming out like anime and the biggest difference here really is that the you can see that the enemy's alien creatures they're not mutated citizens like we wound up with in the full game and none of us were really that happy with them we knew that we wanted we needed some enemies that I could animate reasonably easily all of the enemies we already knew were going to be hand-animated by myself which limited the amount of detail I could really put into them so we were going for very organic squashy looking monsters the problem with that was they didn't particularly have a lot of character and that was something that we we couldn't really get past and the solution to that will be coming up later in the talk so now we've got a video of the first real 3d in engine mock-up that we did to kind

of test these liked ideas out further and make sure we were heading in the right direction and you can see in this that there's a lot more traditional I sort of Jack Kirby influence in the in this in the way we rendered space the monsters are very serious it still got it was still in that kind of system shock to horror sci-fi region and while it's really it fun to me to look at this it's it's interesting as well because we really hadn't figured out really what the direction was for the game yet we would we were really just working through ideas although a lot of these did survive we didn't throw everything out at every stage that's not that's not really the way we work but yeah there's a whole lot of stuff here that really isn't in the final game and especially the the color and lighting is nothing like what we ended up with so one of our takeaways from these experiments was that the chips that we've made in the art that we've done it didn't really look like derelict spaceships they look like functioning spaceships and that didn't

really fit with the gameplay we were looking for which was very much supposed to feel like scavenging so here are concepts of the more derelict beat-up already looted shipwrecks that the player would be looting and rioting throughout the course of the game and lastly here's some concepts of the door switches which we revised many many many times and had dozens of discussions about it's funny to see this now we're considering how much time we did spend on tweaking the way doors worked and which side of the door the handle was and whether or not had a handle and a million other things but let's move on to something more interesting so we approached the spaceships in void Basterds in which the game is primarily composed of from the inside out so after spending a lot of time trying to design and explore the sorts of layouts that would be fun for the player we made the deliberate decision to do that before we bothered worrying about what they look like on the outside so um once we'd gone through that process I started trying to design sort

of exterior skins to these modular Lego like constructions that we were going to do very early on we considered procedurally generating the ships and sometimes people report the ships as being procedurally generated but they aren't they're all hand designed so that they feel like a spaceship with procedural elements inside them like doors that may or may not be broken or at least have furniture that is there sometimes and other times not but the ship's always the same actual layout they're all designed by Jay and this early on though we weren't sure if we were going to do that so the exteriors were also designed to be modular so it was possible that we could build these ships out of pieces that just lock together and different combinations would be different sorts of ship this wasn't something that ended up happening but it drove a lot of the early design and it's interesting to look at these because they don't really look anything like the ships that you might see on the star map now in void Basterds which wound up just being hand-drawn to look

distinct from one other as the most important aspect of the design not so much how well they mirrored what the actual layout was and in this final image you can see I was still clinging to this idea of a sea ship with exposed ribs and dangling guts and I was trying to reintroduce that into these very dry CGI based models that I'd been doing once again due to losing Sketchup primarily because it was the fat it was just the fastest way for me to get this stuff done so I've managed to dig up some really old concepts from very early of what the the player-character and also what the crew of the ships might look like in fact I think at this point we hadn't even decided that the enemies wouldn't be human there was a possibility they might just be people or they might be robots and you can see in all of these designs this is strong it's a much more of a near future International Space Station look that we were going for and it was actually I found that quite difficult to do in a comic book style because it was

very dry by persevered with it and you can see we got some interesting kind of more familiar Hollywood designs I guess I'd say which as you can see really didn't make it into the final game at all we decided to push much harder on improvised handmade dodge together weapons rather than slick things that you'd find on the ship that someone else had designed perfectly here's a fun one this is the the original handgun that we designed it actually had full animations for reloads and and for firing and it looked cool but it also took so long that we decided to use physical animation spring systems for a lot of those things rather than hand animate every frame of each gun being reloaded or firing but this is the instructions for our first stab at that so these pictures are a lot of these actually made it more or less intact into the game this was these were done a lot later but they were when we were we decided what we were doing and I was

just forging ahead with trying to get interesting looking handmade weapons or hand modified weapons that look different to each other and it's kind of cool to see some of them almost didn't change at all some of them no longer in the game like the bomb which was a thing that you threw into a room and made all the monsters run out before it exploded which was just nowhere near as much fun as the cluster flack which is my second favorite name that I came up with for a thing in a video game ever so these are really old this is stuff this is like really early high concept what possible monsters could we have in this spooky haunted spaceship graveyard which we do-- we stuck with all the way through the game these really be decided with there were too much like a horror game and that wasn't really what we were going for I think I'd I still had a lot of System Shock to rattling around in my head which is the sort of game we were trying to make but you know we weren't

trying to remake it we were trying to do our own thing and a big part of that is having your own visual distinctive style so here's some ideas for aliens the reason they're sort of kindness is because I still wanted to sort of push this Sargasso Nebula deep sea but in space feel which we really moved away from completely but that's that's where the barnacle faced man and of the biomimic and all the tentacle he stuff and and the carapace is came from in these pictures but I don't think much of this really survived at all into the full version of the game so staying in the deep-sea vein these this was an idea where all of the enemies or a form of space jellyfish and that took over hosts human beings and gradually morphed them into something else I quite like these but it's by the same token they were kind of just squidgy monsters and we knew we hadn't really quite got there yet with them how these guys are an example of me deciding that I was on the

wrong track so I'd throw a very very hard left turn and tried to do a bunch of 1950s sort of rubber suit enemies that you might find in an old low-budget movie and try and use interchangeable parts to just sort of extend extend the variety and by the same token maybe some really throwback looking although it actually doesn't look that throughout that that spaceship looks more like a void bastard spaceship than anything else seen in this video already but I guess that's what comes out when I try and do that here's a suite of aliens that I designed pretty much none of which made it into the game in any form we don't think they got any further than this drawing the soldier grub we did make a model of but it I don't think it had all of its full suite of animations I think it just sort of stood there the idea here was the enemies were some sort of technological race we utilized bioengineering and had advanced I don't know rubbery technology the gun was kind

of cool but yeah we use nothing else from this so this is a test frame from the first time animated a monster to try out in the game and you might remember it from one of the early bridge concepts earlier in this video it was designed to be animatable and to be stretchy and be able to change shape and to take advantage of the medium but for me once I'd finished doing it I really didn't like it anymore it lost its feeling of elasticity and it was very difficult for me to to animate this well because it although it's supposed to be simple it's actually quite complicated and has far too many lines in it which is a real problem when you have to draw lots and lots and lots of frames so he began to see the first Inklings of what would become the void bastard citizens which is human crew members who have been walked by the Sargasso Nebula into horrible abominations the brain headed guy actually was in the game for quite a long time he would become the sniper

which is the sort of upside down backwards person that we have in the game now this big guy was the original ogre I don't really know what tentacle guy was I he didn't end up in the game because he's a bad drawing so this little style guide sketch was when I felt like I'd kind of actually cracked a good look for the game it doesn't have the heavy black shadows that would become a big part of the style yet but I felt like this was the point at which I derived it the right amount of detail and the right amount of line work that I'd want to put into a monster it was kind of complex but the shapes were easy to draw and the inking style was much much faster the the really smooth clean TV style that I'd used in the earlier monsters so after a lot of design back-and-forth we'd kind of ended up settling on the suite of monsters that we can see here pretty much made it into the game entirely first one didn't The Rocketeer is what eventually would become the Zek

these names are all there our development names for them so they describe them or what the creature did then anything flavorful ghosts pretty similar in fact it's almost identical but this was pre organization so none of these were corporate these were just citizens who turned into monsters as time went on we decided to bring in the idea of the corporation so the ghost was a natori monster so we tried to make him look a lot more like a an espionage sort of character which really just meant putting a hat on him actually and drawing more of the mechanical guts that were hidden in the shadows the swarm always worked this way but this current swarm was just kind of I don't even know what this is it's like robot heads or something the swarm that we ended up going with is meant to be out these patients heads disembodied heads floating around that have somehow become motile so that we didn't we kept the idea of the swarm but we didn't keep the art the sniper as you

can see had this I had this idea of his head turning into a big brain and it actually just didn't look great when it happened so he he got scrapped and turned into the upside down floater works exactly the same way but doesn't have a complicated brain animation also a brain is complicated and time-consuming to draw hundreds of times the blaster is what we would call a janitor now and he's pretty much the same as when he was designed I say he actually it's meant to be a he or she and indistinguishable the ogre we have here is a little smaller than the final ogre we needed to make him look a lot more bulky and threatening then this ogre is actually kind of dainty looking but he's got the same outfit and he does the same thing gremlins pretty much unchanged and the bottom slug this was the old horror style bomb slug which had kind of a guts and skulls and eyeball in it and I'm so much happier with the fedora wearing no eyes exploiting

tourists that we got tourists actually probably my favorite monster in the game so leaping all the way back to the beginning again here are some robot designs that I did when we were thinking of having humanoid robots walking around on the ships possibly oblivious to the player pot and sometimes becoming hostile this isn't something that really made it into the game at all but we did have robots and this robot design was one of the very few early designs that actually made it all the way through and is pretty much unchanged so to finish up it's a lot of fun to show you this early concept comic book cover the fictional comic book cover for a comic that has never existed where we were attempting to pull together all of the ideas that we'd come up with in the story which was something that we hadn't even really written yet we were trying to capture a feel from my point of view I was trying to do a very it's almost a tribute to the old pulp novel and pulp

science fiction comics while trying to get across the idea that the player was in command of an of an endless parade of prisoners who every time they died would be replaced by another I'm not sure how successful that really was in what an illustration but at least showed that you'd be playing a lot of different types of person in this game that it was unmistakably a comic book and there was an evil computer of some kind which if you look at this thing looks absolutely nothing like backs which is a character Cara invented once she started writing which was after this drawing was done I should add and I think there's a yeah there's a screw there giving a guy hug turning him into a monster which is something that obviously doesn't happen in the game anymore but so that's going to wrap it up that's all I've got time for today thanks for watching I'm really disappointed I didn't get to meet you all in person at GDC and have a chat and take some questions maybe next year there'll be less disasters and we can

all hang out then so looking forward to then thanks very much I'm Ben Lee this has been void bastard Zorich stories be excellent to each other