Musical greetings, dear friends!
Today’s making-of is all about the art direction of Symphonia, how the core elements of the scenery were chosen and intertwined to become one. Ready? Let’s dive in!
As mentioned before in another making-of article, the first bit of the world of Symphonia that was thought of was the violinist, Philemon. Then we decided to create a whole musical world as a setting for our virtuoso’s journey. From there, we formed a link between musical elements, and machinery elements, that would be one of the founding stones of our art direction. But why is machinery important? Well, because the realm is mostly inhabited by automatons!
You see, Symphonia is a vast realm where music is a source of life and prosperity for the automatons and the world itself. For this reason, the production of music has partially been automatized by the inhabitants, by mixing gigantic musical instruments with colossal cogs, wheels, and other mechanisms. Thus, music and machinery are tightly intertwined, and we always considered Symphonia as some kind of a giant music box, where the world is influenced by both musical forces, and mechanical forces.
At the beginning of the game and of the demo, you start off in the Slumbering Streets, a desolate corner of Symphonia where silence has taken over, and all that is left to hear is the heavy cranking of giant cogs. For this area, we really wanted the machinery elements to play a central role, as music itself is brought back by the rebirth of Philemon in the opening sequence. To do so, we mixed giant mechanisms, like the door, and towers rising with the theme of opera halls and orchestra rooms: red curtains, concert hall seats, and the public, composed of sleeping automatons, lacking the music needed to survive in this area. To that, we added urban elements like the train station, bells and directional signs, which allowed us to convey how this place was once a place full of life, a point of passage for the inhabitants of Symphonia.
Further in the game, you then travel in areas where music is still persistent, and this mostly thanks to the other musicians still living in this realm. This is the case in the Woodwinds Glasshouse for instance, where musical elements from the Woodwinds instruments have shaped the area, intertwined with glass and the lush foliage which took over recently. Here we can see how the music played by the musician living in the glasshouse really shaped the area. And this is a general idea we tried to follow all along: we really wanted the scenery to tell a story about how the inhabitants, the structures they built, and the music - or its absence, have tightly bonded and influenced each other.
As you might understand, Symphonia will remain a realm shaped by the inhabitants via the use of machinery and music, but it is just as true to say that the inhabitants need music and the machinery to keep living there. This interdependence is what makes Symphonia a place of wonders … but also quite similar to how us humans are tightly connected to nature, wouldn’t you say?
I’ll leave these philosophical questions up to your reasoning! The game's release is now only a couple weeks away, and we still have much to do to prepare for launch. Until then, take care, and see you soon for the next update !
Sunny Peak 🌄
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1865960/Symphonia/