Hey everyone!
This is our first in a series of developer ramblings we’ll be putting out leading up to the release of Mouthwashing. We wanted to give some insight into our thoughts and processes we’ve used throughout making this game. We’ll also be throwing in some concept art, work-in-progress images, and other visuals relating to development throughout these entries.
With our previous title, How Fish is Made, we were working as a smaller team on an incredibly tight turnaround schedule. A lot of the choices made in the design of the game were based on trying to find interesting ways around time and experience limitations within the team. For example, sardines work thematically as creatures representing a perceived lack of individuality, but they’re also just very simple to animate. Their floating eyes that just crunch up to create a blinking effect was inspired by Spyro the Dragon. We wanted the hand painted textures to evoke if Crash Bandicoot went to Silent Hill.
Getting the player to care about their own choice in How Fish is Made was central to the experience, but to really underline that you also ideally felt for all the other fish in the same situation. The fish NPCs had to come across as larger than life characters without being given much unique visual characteristics or even names.
The base model for each fish was the same, with a handful of texture variations and size adjustment available to add visual character. We found it important to make sure each fish was impactful as well as entertaining and memorable as characters without the script getting overwrought and bloated. Working within these constraints definitely helped establish storytelling devices that would eventually bleed over into our next game.
*Early screenshot of How Fish is Made
How Fish is Made definitely explored a more esoteric side of storytelling and leaned heavily on vibes and themes. For our next game we wanted to try a more direct narrative structure, while still keeping things in our strange wheelhouse with some out of the box techniques. We would still be working within a small budget of resources, time and experience. Limited animations, character models and sounds. The game would be longer, feature human characters and a more direct story structure but we would still need to get creative with the design of the game to be able to execute on the vision. With a few more developers added to our ranks, we began work on what would become Mouthwashing.
*Concept art of Anya and Swansea
A few key aspects were present very early on in the central ideas of the game. A sunset in space. Retro futurism. Isolation. Non-linearity. Some of our early influences were Twin Peaks, MOTHERED, Skinamarink and Sunshine. We focused on contrasts, a ship that looks like a kitschy 70s interior design magazine within the crew quarters but the connecting hallways are uncomfortably mechanical, akin to a submarine.
The first character conceived was Captain Curly, his mangled state a contrast to the relatively regular looking rest of the cast. The visual design of the Tulpar crew are all loosely based on popular horror media characters. Some of these influences people have already identified, and will probably continue to when the full game is released. For instance, Daisuke's look is based off of Ryosuke Kawashima from the film Kairo. You’ll never believe it, but Anya is in fact heavily inspired by Shelley Duvall’s Wendy from The Shining.
*Early Daisuke Character Model, before deciding on a slightly less cartoony painting style.
In future posts, we’ll go into more detail about our process for making art assets for the game, how we record and create our audio, as well some other stuff like the tail end of development as we head towards launch.
We'll also be doing a Q&A post during this series, so please feel free to leave some questions on any of the posts!
Thanks for reading,
Wrong Organ
