Militias! Welcome back to the fifth devlog for Only Lead Can Stop Them.
Today we are delve into the background of one of the central pieces of artwork in the game which is the animated character portraits of the male and female protagonists of the game, also called the Miliciano and the Miliciana. These are not names of persons of course but rather they are the Spanish words that was used to describe many of the soldiers that fought against the fascist during the Spanish civil war. It can be translated as militia man and militia woman.
From the very beginning of the games development, I had the firm idea that the game needed to have a animated character portrait that showed the emotional expressions and current health condition of the player. For me it has always been a mystery why this type of feature was abandoned by the game industry and only showed up in a handful of games in the mid 90s since it is a very simple feature that creates a great emotional impact on the player.
The origins of the character portraits can be traced back to fantasy RPGs of the eighties but the first use of the feature in a shooter was made by ID-software in the game Catacomb 3D. It reached its peek popularity in the following games Wolfenstein 3d and Doom in the following years. After that a simplified, less animated variant of the animated portrait was used in the game Quake and a few years later an even more simplified and subtle use of the feature found itself into John Romero’s game Daikatana. Daikatana became the animated character portraits swan song and after that the feature was rarely seen in a shooter game.
Perhaps the feature became too much associated with the game Doom, and since all games that came after Doom struggled with being labeled a mere Doom-clone it could have been that dropping one of the main features was necessary to differentiate and have the game be seen on its own merits.
Nowadays the association isn’t very clear anymore since both the Wolfenstein- and the Doom-franchises didn’t have an animated character portrait in their many sequels. In Boomer shooters the feature has seen a big renaissance and start to become an almost expected feature of a great shooter.
During most of the development of Only Lead Can Stop Them we only had a male character. The original prototype version imagined the main character as a dark-haired fellow with a strong square jaw and slightly darker suntanned skin. I had made this rendition in a hurry and at that point in time I wasn’t that good at pixel art. My main skill is that of a technical artist so this could be called programmer art. Also, the idea for the character felt simple and uninspired.
Lucky for us we found a great pixel artist called Johannes Broman, that would go on to make the majority of the game’s artwork. Johannes reimagining of the main character was the first big step on the road to make the game feel like it was taking shape and started to feel more than a mere prototype. I gave him a lot of creative freedom and he took the design in a completely different direction that felt expressive, original and iconic. The male protagonist was now a redhead with captivating gaze and instead of radiating larger than life strength he was more relatable and frailer as an ordinary human.
Johannes thereafter made a bunch of enemy types and textures as well as different sprits for props and most of the game quickly took shape. However due to various reasons he was unable to stay on for the full duration of the project and went on to other endeavors. A few things were left to be created such as certain enemy types and bosses. I also felt that it was important early on to have a female playable character. This wasn’t mainly motivated by some superficial will to pander to different demographics in order to maximize profit. Rather I felt that that the telling of this historical period would ring false without the recognition of all the bravery and sacrifice displayed by the great multitude of women that fought in the Spanish Civil War. Some of the most iconic images of the war is different portraits of female soldiers getting ready for battle. To some extent the war can be seen also as being about the role of women in society and the fight to preserve their new won right to vote.
The development of the female protagonist would however come to be one of the most divisive issues. Most other aspects of the game the team had a pretty easy time coming to a consensus on how things should be and compromises where rarely necessary to be made. With Johannes Broman out of the picture I had been left doing a lot of the remaining artwork for the game and my skills where growing. I tried my hand at creating the female protagonist and after a lot of thinking I came up with a rendition that imagined her as a very beautiful blond woman. I was inspired by a real life miliciana that was a beautiful blond woman. One of the critics of this version was centered on the fact that it felt weird to imagine a Spanish woman with blond hair. In truth most milicianas were dark haired or brown haired. However, people came from all over the world to support the fight in Spain, so it's not necessarily meant that the female protagonist is supposed to be Spanish. It’s more left to the players own interpretation.
Most of the team wanted to see a rework of the female character since they saw it as expressing the wrong traits. When they imagined a strong female character, they imagined something completely different. Some went as far as saying that my portrayal of her was misogynistic and argued that it would hurt the game saying that she looked more like a bimbo or housewife. The argument however for this wasn’t in my opinion very convincing at all but rather spoke to how much culture had imbedded preconceived ideas of gender in them that in them self was misogynistic. Having studied history at the university a lot of my studies has centered on questions of gender and how ideals of gender has been portrayed in culture thru out history. One such aspect is the fact that strong women has been mostly portrayed in culture as being darkhaired and expressing masculine trait or being associated with foreigners or minority groups. At the same time the idea of the perfect feminine woman has mostly been a blonde, white woman with motherly and frail traits often being a housewife.
In my defense of my version of the female character I made the point that these old patterns are very much a problem today and that my portrayal of her was meant to show that a woman can be strong without losing femininity. The fact that she reminds people of their idea of a housewife or barbie or photo-model or whatever was part of it because when you play as this character and the woman is making bad ass stuff shooting and blowing things up it would create reflection in people by the juxtaposition. Also, I felt that as a character I wanted this woman to be an idealist. I wanted her to be a person that choose to fight for what she believed was right and for that to be possible there needed to be an easy option for her that she rejects. I imagined therefore her to have the option of being like a Marilyn Monroe character or a rich man’s housewife, but her ideals were so strong that she rejected this role in life and in favor of living hard but righteous.
I didn’t completely win the argument. Even though some of the team could better understand my motivation and point of view it still remained that they felt that the audience wouldn’t understand the message and also that my artwork didn’t have the same quality as the male portrait.
One of the team members offered a prototype where the female character would mimic the male character looking almost like a twin redhead woman with only slightly different features. I rejected this idea as being boring. I didn’t see the point with having two nearly identical characters. The only good reason to have more than one character is that they feel different to play, not that they on paper technically has a different gender.
I conceded to a compromise. We would find another artist to make the female character, but I would still be able to tell the message I wanted to tell.
In order to find this artist, we held a small competition that resulted in the winner becoming the artist responsible for the creation of the character. Thereafter Nora Mattsson got to work and her imagination resulted in an interesting character that felt different from the male protagonist but also expressed a lot of emotions.
We tried different hair styles for the character, including a rendition of her as a blonde. However, at this point I felt that the right look for this character was the dark haired version. For some reason the blond hair looked more like a wig as if the face didn’t match.
In the end the rendition of the female character differed from what I had originally imagined and the path the creative process took saw us abandoning my vision and the message it entailed. However the most important goal of creating a nice piece of artwork that felt like it belonged in the game was achieved and in the end I wouldn’t want to change the character a bit.
Recently we had an event where we let an audience play the game and I observed people of all different ages, genders and orientations play the game and I was curious of what character they chose to play. From what I saw it was very mixed. Maybe as many as half of the men chose to play as the female protagonist and it seemed that more than half of the women chose to play as the male protagonist. In the end I believe that games are about taking a short vacation from who we are and for many it can be exciting to imagine being of a different gender for a short while. Giving the player this choice of fantasy adds to the overall experience.
Until Next Time
I hope you enjoyed this background of how the player characters were developed. We hope to give you more exciting stories down the line of current and upcoming features.
I’ll see you in the next devlog
- Dan Pettersson, creative director and tech artist
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909100/Only_Lead_Can_Stop_Them/