Sturdy silhouettes

Titanocamelus polydentis (also known as "sturdy") is one of the creatures I have already designed, but I will post my process here for record-keeping (and for keeping this blog interesting).

I usually start off with a bunch of quick silhouettes, to try and eke out an interesting shape or concept. Sometimes I'll hit on something I like pretty quickly and sometimes I go through many iterations before I find a good silhouette. When I'm drawing silhouettes I often switch between ideation and refinement, and as often as not I'll hit upon an idea for a different creature than the one I think I'm working on. Half the time I'll look at something I've just drawn and get an idea for a different beast entirely. For Sturdy however, I started off with a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to be its defining feature, which is an extended lower jaw.

Silhouettes are an easy way to run through many versions of a design quickly, but they also help you see now easy a creature will be to identify from a distance. Especially when designing with a video game world in mind, it is important for the player to be able to recognize different enemy types quickly and without detail. (I plan to exploit this at some point by having a "mimic" creature that impersonates a much more dangerous foe). Sturdy is an herbivore (or fungivore, it eats mostly mushrooms) that travels in small family herds through mostly open areas. The bulky body and low head will make it easy to spot.

Some of these were done with a brush pen, some were done digitally, and the sketches were done with a ballpoint pen.

Revised terrestrial food web

Ok! So I updated the terrestrial food web. It's still not totally nailed down, but getting closer.

Here the colors indicate place on the food chain/diet

And here the colors indicate what habitat within the dome is that creature's natural habitat

Food web revision

So! After posting the food webs here, I decided to go through them again and give them a good revision. I made the original food webs quite early on in my planning process, so at this point I have a more detailed idea of what I want in many of the creatures, so I went through, made some notes, refined, and changed some of the elements of both food webs. It keeps getting more and more complicated, which might get me into trouble eventually when I have to execute all of these items. But I would rather have something complicated and more interesting than something simple but boring.

So now my food webs look like this:

I'm going to go over them and make a new version that incorporates these changes, which will be my next post.

Food webs

Here are the food web diagrams I worked out for both the terrestrial and the aquatic ecosystem of Dark Waters. There will be some overlap between the two systems, but I figured the diagrams were complicated enough to begin with. According to diagrams I found on wikipedia, the accepted notation for food webs is A ---> B means that A --is eaten by--> B, even thought that seems a bit counterintuitive.

These may be somewhat subject to revision as I proceed with the project, but the general form of the web and relationship of the creatures should stay mostly the same. The names I'm using thus far are shorthand, and some of these creatures have been further developed than others. In some cases I'm using the name of an existing animal that has some of the traits I want to bring to my creature ("clownfish" for example, will not be a clownfish, but will have developed resistance to the sting of the giant jellyfish and therefore can live among its tentacles without fear of predators). The colors relate loosely to that creature's preferred diet. Red represents the top predator, and green and turquoise respectively represent herbivores or fish that eat plankton.

Terrestrial food web

Aquatic food web

Dark Waters project blog

I am officially beginning a blog for my thesis project, Dark Waters. Hopefully this will help me record my progress and process as I design the world of Dark Waters.

For those of you who don't know (or have forgotten) Dark Waters is going to be the backbone of a game. In short, I'm designing an ecosystem. Or to be more accurate, two related ecosystems. The first is a terrestrial environment protected by a huge dome that has sunk to the bottom of the ocean. This is a self-contained environment that has been evolving virtually in a vacuum. Although the sciences that created it are almost extinct, the humanoid inhabitants keep the huge self-contained dome functioning with technology that has become shamanistic through the generations. Many of the creatures living inside the dome survived, and have over the generations created a highly specific and tightly woven food web. The other ecosystem is that of the Abyssal zone, the deep sea creatures that surround the dome and interact with it.

I plan to post images, thoughts, creature descriptions, general progress updates, and tidbits of narrative relating to my project on this blog. Hopefully it will keep me updating, and perhaps keep some of you interested as well.

—Katie