Designing an Anxious World
Bound was born from a specific aesthetic idea: a cute character in a "nightmarish, gargantuan world." I began by exploring possible directions for the environment. Having explored dreams and Surrealism in previous projects, I knew I wanted to create a subconscious world. This would allow me to bring disparate locations together in a way that cohered with the broader narrative.
Bound was created under Point Reverie, the game development studio I created during my final year of university. As such, more than any prior project, I was concerned with following a replicable production process that would enable me to build on the game efficiently in the future.
I began with by curating a few moodboards, to discover areas that would be exciting to explore. At this stage, there wasn't a particular overarching theme that tied these areas together; rather, as I accumulated similar images, I began to imagine possible applications in a platformer context.
Around the same time, I started making sketches for what the game's protagonist might look like. With the contrast between cute character and daunting world in mind, I took a cartoony approach. I considered the character designs of childrens' animation and book illustrations, with their simple, recognisable silhouettes, limited colour schemes and exaggerated proportions. In particular, I tried to think about the mindset of a character designer for those kinds of works: will this be easy to draw repeatedly or animate? Will this be fun for other people to draw?
The protagonist's design went through multiple iterations. Certain elements were constant, like having a flowing piece of clothing to reinforce direction of movement during gameplay. Other elements, like the protagonist's tired demeanour, were left out of the final designs, but made their way into aspects of the narrative. The character design was finalised in Photoshop.
With a protagonist in place, I created concept artwork for some possible environments. The skyscraper and castle both fit nicely within the 'daunting world' theme. A contrasting piece was made as an exploration of where the protagonist might come from.
Despite my intentions of following a stable production pipeline from the get-go, I quickly learned that there is no one-size fits all approach. You don't know what you don't know until you try and realise what you could do better the next time. With Bound, I was a solo developer, responsible for all aspects of the project, not just its art direction. While I would eventually pick up the threads I left behind in the concept artwork, other parts of production took priority, and other parts of the business required attention.
I did model, texture, rig and animate the protagonist fairly early on, but I didn't get back to the environment until much later in the year.
Though I was primarily focused on gameplay in the interim, I continued thinking about Bound's world, and the narrative gradually took form. I thought about why I was drawn to the idea of a child-like character in an overwhelming, big new world. For me, it was rooted in an anxiety around growing into a transitional stage of life.
One piece of concept art in particular resonated with this idea, and the contrast at the crux of Bound's aesthetic: the concrete guts of an industrial megastructure, bleak, vast, and unknowable.
This was the area I decided to build out for Bound's first demo, as I believed it best captured the overall atmosphere. After the character controller was finalised, I created a new scene and sketched a level layout.
The sketch didn't translate particularly well to 3D space in Unity. It was difficult to judge scale -- I knew I wanted the area to feel gigantic, but I didn't want the player to feel slow moving through it. As such, I decided to move directly into greyboxing. This would make it easier to get a sense of the 3D space.
Part of the desired atmosphere for the area was an inorganic, inhospitable feeling. The geometric compositions created in the greyboxing stage translated fairly naturally to the modelling phase.
The process of actually modelling the greybox layout was somewhat clunky. I exported the geometry from Unity as an FBX, and then modelled piece-wise, but a more modular approach would likely be beneficial in the future.
To finish up the area, I paid close attention to colour and lighting. In the texturing process, I stuck to a limited colour palette. Though the area was meant to be drab and grey, I wanted to inject some colour, and so used shades of blue. When lighting the scene, I used a contrasting orange to capture the player's attention and provide appealing specular highlights.
Finally, I added post-processing and ambient particles (in game, these follow the player's position). Creating the demo area ended up taking longer than I initially anticipated, but I got to experience the full production pipeline for an environment in Bound, which should only get smoother as I continue developing the game.
