Etherborn: Structured Thoughts
Etherborn is the game I have been working on from 2014 to 2019. I was mainly in charge of the creative direction, level and puzzle design, art direction, modelling, illumination, and technical art (including creating new shaders), among other things. After all, we were only five people in the team!
The game is an environmental puzzle platformer with gravity-twisting mechanics. The sceneries are the puzzles in themselves, as they have to be solved by exploring and understanding their structures. The story follows the journey of a voiceless being that is seeking to be reunited with a bodiless voice that is calling her.
"Structured Thoughts" is the fourth level of the game. It represents a moment of enlightment in the character's life, where a new reality starts to unveil before her. It is heavily based on the Russian Suprematist painting art movement (plus Piet Mondrian, who was close to it), which seeked a "Supreme" experience of art through pure shapes and colors.
The idea behind this segment was to make a moving and interactive Mondrian-esque painting.
It is a small navigational puzzle where the player must understand and memorize the behaviour of two different kinds moving pieces: white and black blocks.
Red and black lines serve a way to relate and memorize paths placed in different gravity orientations, as well as a big landmark that is not just integrated in the composition, but is the composition in itself.
Birds fly towards the player when reaching this point. The pillars in the back serve as a constant point of reference in a scenery where white fog is the only background.
The shapes are based in a painting by early XXth Century Russian painter Olga Rozanova. The tone I chose for the white fog imitates an old canvas.
The openess of this level actually hides many precise measurements. For example, the broken stairs are cut in a way that allow the player to jump to different heights in different gravity orientations. Low-fi art is good for this.
Level design in progress.
When I create sceneries and puzzles, I rarely use white or gray boxes. I prefer to built composition separating areas by colors.
This is how the level looked once I started to add the camera systems.
I tried to make it it look like an abstract sculpture as much as possible to ensure that the composition was easy to memorize and that it looked interesting.
Ballpen sketch on a DinA4 paper. Such a freely shaped tree turned out to be a problem for the gameplay (since the gravity mechanics are based on 90º turns). In the end, the organic touch was added by bushes and bamboo trees.
Comparision between a level design sketch I did and 'Suprematism', a 1916 painting by Olga Rozanova. A large part of this level was designed thinking: 'if I turned this painting into a 3D interactive environment, how would it look?'.