Finding The World
This is going to be the first of a few posts about the art direction of The Last Clockwinder, which recently released on the Quest store and Steam.
It has some spoilers for both the story and the puzzles in it, so beware!
When I first started working with Matt and John on “Project Clockwork”, the game was in a pretty amorphous state, and the studio (now Pontoco) had a different name. They’d been working on it for a few months already, so the prototype of the core cloning mechanic already existed, along with some vague ideas around world design, and some slightly more solid ideas about the emotional tone. Mostly, there was this abstract sense of possibility. Scary.
Initial Sketching
I almost always start a new project off with very freeform sketching and note taking, especially when I’m coming in this early in the process. We didn’t know what kind of world we were going to make. Sci-fi? Magical? Post apocalyptic wasteland? Ancient or futuristic? This kind of openness can be so daunting that it’s helpful to start with the things that already exist (the mechanic) and just do some very loose brainstorming.
In this case, I was sketching before actually spending time playing the prototypes. I didn’t have a VR setup at the time (or a PC that was capable of running VR games) and so I focused on the few things that I’d gathered by watching videos of prototypes and chatting with John and Matt. Mainly, the nature of the mechanic itself: making short looping clones of your own actions implies a repetitive task.
Here’s one of my first sketch pages, where I’m trying to figure out what you’d even be able to do with this mechanic. As you can see, I didn’t quite grasp what the actual feel of the prototypes were like! A lot of the repetitive actions I was thinking of here require fairly small, dextrous movements (braiding, beading, etc) which are hard when you’re holding VR controllers.
There are also some gems that I should never have left behind, like “making cocoons for worms”.
When I’m doing this kind of ideation, I don’t actually draw all that much, and instead write down a lot of notes. I also only ever use sheets of printer paper. Using cheap materials that I can easily shuffle through (or throw out if they’re truly awful) gives me the mental freedom to have a lot of bad ideas.
Such as, “make 50 golden beetles. but why?” along with a sketch of what is definitely a fly, not a beetle.
This freeform sketching also allowed me to think about repetition in a more abstract sense. Repetitive actions that we do all the time become habits, so what does it mean to automate them or farm them out to other beings? I don’t know, and that didn’t end up being much of a theme in the game anyways! But it was fun to mull over.
These helped me feel like I was exploring the possibilities in a loose way. It’s difficult for me to jump in to longer projects without going through this process, even though almost all of the ideas are (rightfully) thrown out.
Here’s a stack of the sketch pages I saved from this project. Most of these are from fairly early on - as we solidified the visual style and direction, it got easier to do ideation work digitally.
In addition to the mechanic, there are a few things that we all agreed we like. Plants and nature. An underlying thread of natural conservation. Stories that have a smaller, personal feel, instead of “saving the universe” style narratives. Some coming of age themes. Repair, maintenance, caring for things.
As I was noodling around on those sketches, we also started putting together a miro board of inspirations. We collected images that we thought captured the mood we wanted to evoke, specific spaces and styles we liked, pretty much anything that we thought had a chance of fitting in. This board evolved a lot during development and is pretty massive. Here’s the ‘inspirations’ area in its current state - unfortunately I no longer have a clear idea of what it looked like at the beginning! It was much less organized.
We kept coming back to this idea of a treehouse room that was bathed in sunlight, that felt warm and cozy and lived-in, small but not cramped. We knew from an early stage that the puzzle platforms would swap out of one static space, and so it was important that the peripheral area was a pleasant environment to spend a good chunk of time in.
Organic / mechanical
Over time, we solidified the idea of the [spoiler!!] tree-spaceship. Originally, we had the idea that it had crash landed near a village. A girl had found the entrance and been able to get inside. From there, she needed to repair the ship using the clones in order to launch it. Here’s some early ideation around the crashed tree-ship.
A lot of the early world design sketches were significantly more organic and less mechanical than what we ended up with. That’s mostly due to my own comfort zone- wobbly organic shapes will always be the first things I think of, and come a lot more naturally to me than mechanical or architectural designs.
There was also a much more magical feel to the world in the beginning stages. This is a super early sketch of a room with leaves that you had to light up in a certain rhythm by throwing things at them. It’s a similar mechanic to the bell beast, but in a very different visual package.
The constructed aspects of these final visuals feel a lot more consistent with the precision of the actual game mechanic, and more built elements made the whole thing feel more grounded. Everything you see in the environment implies something about the nature of the world, and we decided the world should be more mechanically driven.
We ended up with a lot of whimsical and fantastical things about the world design anyways (It’s a ship that’s also a tree! It’s powered by fruit juice! There are mechanical beasts in it that help it function!) and we wanted to pull back from a world that had that Magic-with-a-capital-M feeling. No spells allowed!
So the concepts I was making shifted away from the super organic feeling spaces. The first ideas of the main room in the tree was a hollowed out trunk space with shelves tacked on - much more of an improvised space instead of a deliberately constructed room. Here’s one of those.
Prompted by continued discussions with John and Matt about what the world should feel like, I started drawing more tech-y stuff like control panels, wires, and screens. Here’s an early control panel and a mechanical clone.
Here’s another early concept that I think is one of the first that starts to hint at the way the room ended up in the final game. It’s still early, so I hadn’t figured out what the ‘tech’ stuff would look like yet! But the sense of being in a human-constructed room sitting in the branches of a tree is finally there.
Next up: Setting a visual style and figuring out the actual room layout.