World Design - Tumblr Posts
Backgrounds from some character illustrations I did a while ago. They've aged better than the actual characters so I'm posting them on their own.
Good world design elements that you should almost always use:
Large carnivorous monsters that kill and eat people but also serve as mounts and are sweet babies with the people that handle them.
Floating islands that logically make no sense but are cool to explore
Baseball bats as weaponry in any remotely modern-ish setting
Elemental type triangles/squares
Nonhuman cultures and locations build with their individual bodies and abilities in mind
The land between is a weird place
When you take the time to look at it, elden ring world is exceptionally bizarre, even by fantasy standards. The giant tree illuminating the sky day and night is kind of obvious, but its also a world where spontaneous generations is canon, a world where the stars are living monstrosities and immortality is the norm. But the strangest part of all is that this land doesn'tt even feel natural. Everywhere you look, there are there giant stones pillars holding the edges of continents, the water in the distance show these peculiar dips, as if the land between was elevated above the rest of the ocean. If we ever go into space during the DLC, i wouldn't be surprise if we see that the land between isnt even a planet but instead a flat disc carried by some kind of massive creature.
Chapter 6: Cloud Castle Resting upon the crown of the world are the ruins of an ancient castle, the very place where the calamity was once defeated. The quiet and desolated peaks offer little resistance on this final stretch of the journey. if even the greatest of heroes could only delay the inevitable, what hope does a broken world have of stopping it?
Just Lady, enjoying a quiet and peaceful night in the breach.
Got two theories for the land of shadow locations
1st: Since there appears to be some kind of veil in the sky, the land of shadow could be located under the sea in the middle of the land between. Kind of like Hyrule in Wind Waker 2nd: The land between is a flat world and the land of shadows is located in its flipside. You might say it exists, in a way, in the shadow of the Erdtree.
Irredeamable developpement retrospective Part 4: The city of dolls Well, took us some time, but we finally reached a project that actually got some gameplay. Not much mind you, didnt even finish the first area, but youll probably notice some stuff that did manage to make its way into irredeamable in some form. So this game was meant to be a simple, self-contained story to introduce the new setting of the fountain (aint that familiar) It was about this city whose entire economy and structure was built around hyper-inteligent android/animatronics called the dolls. Here is one with a human for comparison. Aint they cute? (the horns were meant to be some kind of stylised antennas)
Everything was going fine for the city, until one day where the dolls appeared to suddenly go mad. They became violent, unhinged, destructive, causing a terrible riot to wage through the city, forcing the local authorities to take action. (the object on the right is a doll recharge station, which would be used to save and heal)
That`s where the player character comes in. Cassy-A, a new military doll prototype is sent through the ravaged streets of the city to try and find the source of the madness that has taken over the dolls and stop the riots. Unlike most dolls, her humanoid proportions and appearance allow her to blend amongst humans and her intelligence and ability to adapt is far beyond the usual doll.
For the first few areas, Cassy fight against the maddened dolls and human rioters until she is met with a very unusual masked doll, Smile/Smiley.
Unlike the usual doll who are only capable of speaking in pre-recorded sentence, Smile can piece out speech from diverse recordings, delivering her intentions to free the dolls from their metal prison and offering for Cassy to join her. As expected, Cassy refuses and defeats Smile, only for a nuke to detonate and raze the city. Cassy consciousness is then rewinded and she is brought back to the moment she was activated. With her new understanding of what is to come, she now has to make different decisions if she wishes to stop Smile's plans and save the city from destruction.
And here come the struckture of the game, where the player must explore different paths, to gather information and find how to stop the nuke and any other threat the city might be facing. So now that we got the premises set up, here are some of the plans i had made for it.
This one shows a bunch of different dolls. They come in all kind of shapes and size but generally were tough, bulky ennemies with sur-human strength, abilities to control energy/electromagnetism and even some built-in weapons for military models like the seraph.
This one shows some notable characters, such as Reeve, the commander of the city of dolls military. Kay-C a Cassy model doll that had joined Smile. Cassy-B and Cassy-D, a second pair of dolls that serves the government and are sent to face against the player if they stray out of line and Aria Rottendale, the robotic CEO of dolls incorporated. There is also this one maid doll, which was intended to reveal the true nature of the madness where the dolls are sentient, but trapped inside a limited body and mind, unable to express their true feelings in any other way than violence. By this point the dolls are able to manufacture screams out of statics and compose cries for help out of disjointed syllables from their pre-made sentences.
These show some of the planned routes. Red being the initial riot, leading to the doomed fight with Smiley, blue being a route where Cassy turns against the government (leading to the Commander Reeve and Double Cassy fight). Purple has her hide in a shelter, allowing her to survive the nuke and investigate the aftermath. Orange has her investigate the doll mansion and discover the maddened maid doll and Yellow would be an infiltration of the Dolls Inc. building to find the origins of the dolls. Each dead end is some kind of ending where either Cassy is inevitably defeated and contained, or destroyed, forcing her to rewind to a previous point. Aniway, like usual, there are some plans that dont quite fit this story, such as those maps that included the lore of the fountain in some way.
Aniway, this is it for this part of the retrospective, but lets end on a positive note. Despite this game being abandoned pretty early, some parts of it still exist in irredeamable today. Most notably is Lady moveset which is nearly identical to how Cassy played and even the concept of a robotic superweapon being the playable character has stuck from this point.
The forced grins of the dolls was incorporated into the edenian aesthetic in the form of their metal masks. And i even added a doll enemy late in development, with a bit of an updated look and lore that reference the original game story.
Anyway, i hope you enjoyed this tour of the defunct city of dolls. We are almost at the end of this retrospective, for the next part is the project that preceded irredeamable and where i began working on the setting that would flourish into the one you get to experience. Tune in for part 5: Project Watchmakers