Inspiration and a new Creation

Hello,

Welcome to my new blog.
I decided to start this because I have finally been inspired, and ended my creative drought :D

The trigger of this inspiration was a book that I found on a friends coffee table. called "Newport Pem and Fishguard Revisited" it was a book about the area where we had grown up in. Containing lots of photographs from the late 1800's to the early 1900's.

I was fascinated by images of the places I had known all my life and how different they were. There weren't decent roads, or half the amount of buildings there are now. There also seemed to be a lot of people there, which is a huge change from the ghost like town it is now. Industry and trade were huge in that area at the time, and almost everyone seemed to be involved.
I wish I could see it with my own eyes.....
alas!
I can't.

Here are some of the pictures I liked most
























































































































With a new interest in the Old, I casually browsed through information of historic events from 1700 to 1900, which I enjoyed but decided to look further into the 1800's. The 1800's I found interesting because they didn't seem really really old, or were they similar to the to much seen early 1900's of the first world war. The Victorian era in particular has a very harsh and cruel feel to it.

I decided that I'd like to come up with something based around the 1800's. A game most probably :)

Pitching for a job in the last couple of weeks sometime, I was tasked with making 2D silhouette animations for a game coinciding with an up and coming Chanel4 docu/drama.
For the pitch, I made a 2D puppet in Flash, which I then Rigged in After Effects. The result was pretty cool and seeing as I didn't get the job, I thought I may as well keep the idea in mind and use it for something else in the future.

So after watching the Hughes Brothers 'From Hell', I though it might be cool to use the silhouette puppets in 2D Victorian based game :D
Perhaps based on Jack the Ripper.....Or coal mining children

I converted the Soldier puppet I made for the pitch into a man and an Oliver Twist style boy






















I quite liked the idea of an original Prince of Persia style game, set in a maze like coal mine. It would be pleasing to the eye and would be pretty easy to make. But I also liked the idea of using the gloomy streets of Victorian London as a backdrop, which would also be great to play with lighting. Seeing as I am apparently colourblind and find colour pretty hard to use, I thought this would all definitely look good in black and white :D

I chucked the Rig of the boy straight down a mine to see how it would look and I quite liked it.











While playing around with the mines idea, I remembered a few drawings I had done a few years ago of some kind of cave dwelling creatures I called 'Stalkers'
















































































They would travel round in pairs, one has eyes and the other a mouth. The Idea being that one would search for food (the seeker) and the other would then eat it (the feeder).
This doesn't really work that well, which was a design problem at the time and still it. It could be resolved, but I have long since gone off the idea of them traveling in pairs.
I drew these about a month or two before 'The Descent' was released..so once that came out and I realized my monsters where very similar one the ones in that, I just forgot about them, until now.
I still really liked their shape and wanted to see how it would look in silhouette.















Turns out that it looks pretty good :D
I get it a tail to give it a little more balance in its cave environment as it still doesn't have any arms.













It looks pretty scary eh?

So.....I really like it.
The equation for the game at this point looks like this....

Victorian Era + The Descent + Jack The Ripper = What ever I'm making

It could be a platformer? Point and click? Puzzle? Mystery? Horror? Action? Violence ridden?...anything at this point...

I think that's it for now..Though I will make a separate post today with a new image or two that I have been working on :D