Hey everyone! Dora here, your friendly neighborhood producer. While the team is hard at work polishing puzzles and blasting bugs, I thought I'd step in to share an update.
The Tartarus Key has been in development with us for over a year, and in that time I've seen the game change in some pretty big ways. Some of these come down to scrapping puzzle designs and rebuilding them from the ground up, or reworking the mansion's layout. But one of the more interesting examples I can give is how the cast has changed their style.
Our intrepid reluctant protagonist, Alex Young, is an easy example. This is Alex as you'll meet her in the game. An average young woman stuck in an unlikely scenario. But in the beginning, the team experimented with her personal style in a way that made her look a little less average, and a little more cool and capable. Someone who looked a little tougher in a way that says, "Hey you, freaky mansion! I'm not scared of you!"
Ultimately, however, we liked the idea of a protagonist who didn't look quite so capable. We're hardly the first game to go this route - Harry Mason of original Silent Hill fame is another example of an ordinary person in an extraordinary scenario. But we felt it might make Alex easier to connect to and root for.
Once we had her basic look down, we wanted to refine her dialogue portrait. Because the game is in a first person perspective, you don't really get to see Alex the way you do other characters, so having somewhere she could be seen and be expressive was really important. As you can see from these sketches, the final design changed a little from concept to conclusion, but not drastically.
And this is the end result! Say hi, Alex!... wow, she looks mad.
Beyond Alex, of course, every other character you'll meet has a portrait for dialogue, and a range of expressions to boot. Take Charles, for instance; he's one of the characters you'll meet in the game. He's a well-meaning but scatterbrained academic type, so we wanted his design to reflect a person who was intelligent, but probably also a little easily distracted and nervous.
Fun fact; while all of these characters are drawn and animated by hand thanks to our artist Leo Parra, there was a time when we considered going a different route with AI generated and animated portraits. In theory, this might have saved us some time, and anyone who has had anything to do with video game development knows time is one of the most valuable resources you have to keep track of. You can see an early experiment of that below.
While it's not bad, we wound up deciding against it for a few reasons. One of the biggest is that it simply didn't fit the look and feel of the game, which as you likely can already tell was heavily influenced by what are now considered "retro" low-poly titles from the PSOne era. We felt this might be a little more modern than we were shooting for.
There was also a lack of control, since while you could set some parameters, ultimately you got what the computer gave you. We could have painted over the results to make them truly look like what we were shooting for, but at the end they likely would have needed such extensive work that we would have negated any time we would have saved. And that would have made our producer very sad.
(Me. It's me. I'm the producer. I would have been sad.)
Anyway, that's it for this month! We're hard at work putting together a lot of finishing touches for the game, but that doesn't mean we're done. We're looking forward to being able to share more news with you soon! Thank you for reading, and for all your support!
