Concept art - NPC interaction, poisoned status effect and death screen [WEEK 7]

For some more ideas to push the vision of our game i created a potential NPC interaction and how the NPCs might look. I imagined them to look similar to the sketchbook style creatures and plants as we are looking through the eyes of the researcher, he would likely draw the people he met on his journey as well as the main subjects of his research. To achieve this i used the pencil tool for almost all of the lineart [which i purposefully left loose and sketchy] and the colours to give it that coloured pencil look. I imagine important NPCS might also be highlighted to help the player identify who they need to talk to in a much easier way. This character's design is based off of a character i made a while ago for an unrelated project, but i thought her design fit really well into the setting with the colours i used. Her name is Raspberry and she is one of the specialists behind the greening project. 

Following on from this i created a sketch of how the poisoned status effect might look when Cedric eats a plant that is not edible, this effect would create a wavy effect around the players hand as well as perhaps a slight bit of chromatic aberration to infer the character is hallucinating. Along with this the players hp would slowly be chipped away for however long the status effect lasts. This mechanic would mostly be present in the latter third of the game in which the player must survive the night as rescue teams come to find them, to keep their stamina up they must find food, this ties into the journaling mechanic as if they have not sufficiently researched the edible plants, they may eat something that is not edible and suffer the consequences. I had a thought about the implications of potential drug use and how these plants provide that hallucinogenic status effect, and how this might effect our age rating. According to PEGI (2024), the use of drugs in a game rated 16 is permitted, so whilst our game is not explicitly showing drug use, we can still portray this status effect without any problems to our rating.

Finally i considered what might happen if the player dies, either through failing combat with a predator or eating one too many poisonous fruits, or what other misfortunes might befall them in the jungle. I thought that a death screen with perhaps implications that they were dragged away by some jungle inhabitants might really solidify that feeling of this environment being hostile to the player and completely wild. The drawing Pantelis had created of the Komodo dragon came to mind and it being centre with perhaps a limb of the character and a trail of blood in my mind could be quite interesting. I also didnt want to include the classic "you died" or "game over" title, instead i thought the phrase "Hunted" could be quite interesting, reminding the player that no matter how powerful they go into the jungle feeling, theyre nothing more than prey just waiting to be caught. Although this idea seemed really interesting to me, i was worried this might boost our age rating up to an 18 due to the severed limb, I decided to do some research into this and asked my teammates their stance on how this might affect our game. The PEGI(2024) website states that "This rating is applied once the depiction of violence reaches a stage that would be expected in real life" on top of this i found PEGI(2024) also states that 16-18 age ratings can depict violence, the difference being 16 ratings are generally realistic meanwhile 18 ratings can be over exaggerated. As our game has a stylized look and the blood in this piece is minimal we agreed that this probably wouldnt be an issue, however to stay on the safe side, i plan to make a version without the arm.

The director also did some research into games rated at a PEGI 16 and how violence is portrayed in those games, this is what she said:

 
Niamh : "okay looking at some games most soul like games are a 16 and I think theyre a bit freaky but then again there's no dismembering in that game - there are some other games that have dark themes to them and stylised like miss unfortunate and the wolf among us. I'm pretty sure there is a body dismemberment in wolf among us so it could be okay actually"

I also made sure to create versions of these designs without the UI overlays so that the UI artist/Director could edit them as she saw fit.

As I wasn't sure on the death screen still, i made a few other versions with two different censoring methods.

here I changed the blood to be purple to make the fantasy violence aspect more apparent.

In this one i just edited out the arm entirely.