It's the year 1999. Alternative metal band KoRn releases their fourth album, “Issues,” featuring cover art depicting a torn rag doll on it. The album’s last promotional single, “Somebody Someone,” and its music video, released in 2000, features the band performing the song amidst some arthropods, like roaches, a spider, and a fly. Two years later, the band released a DVD compilation of music videos, interviews, and different behind-the-scenes clips. But, the twist was that once you put the disc on the DVD player, you would find yourself immersed in some kind of creepy escape room game, navigating through an apparently abandoned asylum and looking for hidden codes to unlock new videos in different locations.
A rag doll, arthropods, and an abandoned house. Sound familiar?
Well, fast forward to 2006, Mariona, now creative and art director in Mango Protocol, drew inspiration from listening to KoRn during those years to write a short and abstract story. In that story, she introduced a character based on the ragdoll from the "Issues" album cover. The narrative unfolded as the ragdoll explored around a house divided into concentric spaces, looking for insects to deliver to a girl who seemed to be working on some kind of obscure project.
Short storyboard inspired by KoRn's fourth album "Issues", and music video compilation "Deuce".
While originally envisioned as a script for a puppetry-based short film, it wasn't until 2018 that the pieces fell into place. Mariona, along with Javi and Jordi, transformed her earlier ideas into the foundation for the fourth installment of the Psychotic Adventures saga: CLeM, a mystery puzzlevania adventure with a dark twist.
Javi started working on that original abstract story and, knowing Mariona for more than 14 years, distilled all the ideas and thoughts behind it and adapted it into something that could fit better with the team's vision for a narrative-driven puzzle game. Maintaining the dark essence and main elements from Mariona's initial script, he expanded it into a fully realized story that resonated even more personally with her. Meanwhile, Jordi, armed with this narrative blueprint, crafted the gameplay, designing a really wide range of environmental and self-contained puzzles, each intricately linked to the overarching story. Every puzzle is tightly connected with the narrative, so they always feel coherent with the story, the characters, and the world in the game. Mariona, on the other hand, reimagined all the visuals for the story, starting with the player character — the ragdoll. However, as it usually happens when Mariona starts doodling ideas, not many drafts are needed until the team falls in love with one of them.
We always wanted CLeM to be a cute and creepy experience, and Mariona knew that the ragdoll (that we call “the servant”) needed to have the “cute” element, with a tiny body but a big head, and a static but friendly face. Contemplating a few ideas for the inventory system, the concept of a zip on the nape of the servant’s head emerged as a practical solution since all items could be stored inside, which made a lot of sense and simplified the general design of the servant. It also allowed Jordi to add a nice animation to the zip puller while the servant is walking.
Lastly, Mariona still had many options for the eyes, the zip, maybe an eyebrow and some hair, and other details like patches or the actual colours for every part. Greenish, so they look more like a zombie? Brownish, so they somehow resemble the fabric of a potato sack? Well, during the first year of development we called that character “potato”, so you can guess which colours Mariona decided to go with.
And that's how our cute servant ended up looking how they do!
We hope you enjoyed learning about the inspirations and creative process behind the servant. Feel free to share your thoughts here, on our socials, and Discord server. We have some more content like this to show you in future publications so you can know more about the beautiful and twisted world of CLeM. Stay tuned!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1861440/CLeM/
