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purplekoop · 1 month ago

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So Subnautica 2 got its first trailer today, after already having some teasers and interviews reveal its existence and main new feature of co-op multiplayer, and of course my excitement is right back at its usual highs when thinking about one of my favorite games ever. My friends I've shared the first game with are already hyped for the eventual multiplayer sessions, one even taking it as a sign to play the original on the spot for the first time. But in this excitement I checked the comments on the trailer, and saw some comments that... baffled me. Obviously looking at youtube comments for just about any game is going to worsen your mental health, but beyond the murmurs bemoaning and making edgy comments about Below Zero were people that are excited for the game, and listing what they hope a new Subnautica could offer. Such as... improved combat? New "enemies" and "bosses"? in... Subnautica??

Now, to some people this is probably just petty word choice that just puts Subnautica in line with almost any other game where things can attack you and you can attack them back. But to me, it conveys a misunderstanding of what Subnautica is, and what makes it so so special as a game, beyond just its worldbuilding and survival mechanics, but with its environment, its tone, its heart as a game made with the intention of doing more than just meet expectations.

So, here's:

A Brief Piece on Subnautica, Online Culture, and What Makes a Game Special

(note: this post will be free of any spoilers for Subnautica 1 or Below Zero, but does contain brief references to real world violence.)

If you took any number of people with a shared favorite game, and asked them why it is, it'd be bafflingly improbable to find they all like it for the exact same reasons. Most mediums of art are like this, but video games especially lend themselves to a greater number of different factors for what makes them enjoyable for different people. Not only can games have audio, visual, and narrative components capable of replicating or outright containing other mediums, but there is the added layer of interactivity and the art of creating a feel of gameplay adds a unique and extremely subjective element to a game as an experience.

Take Sonic the Hedgehog, a series that has a remarkably enduring fanbase for a franchise often panned by outside critics for the gameplay of some entries. While many fans love the series exclusively for the satisfying high-speed flow of some of the games, what draws just as many fans (if not more) is the impeccable soundtracks, or the charming and well-designed characters, or the stories that define those characters, or even the potential for further stories with them that fans realize themselves. A Sonic fan who hasn't even played a single game themselves but still loves the characters, style, music, or whatever other element has just as much reason to be called a "Sonic Fan" as someone who's played every game but never once interacted with the more character and story-oriented side of the fanbase. This dissonance between gameplay-biased fans and fans who enjoy the non-gameplay aspects isn't hard to find, but even within a gameplay focus there's a countless array of potential reasons someone enjoys a game. Minecraft fans for instance consist of speedrunners, minigame server grinders, hardcore challenge runners, people who play on peaceful because they're scared of the monsters, friend groups who goof around on a server playing normal survival badly, absolute mad lads making particle colliders or supercomputers, and your little cousin who just likes building roller coasters. Every single one of these is a valid way to play the game and enjoy it. Even if the core survival mode is the "intended" way to play, it'd be odd to say any of these other options are any less valid.

So... what about Subnautica? More specifically: why my frustration then, if those who see Subnautica's mechanics as a game with enemies and bosses to fight ought to be just as "correct" under this perspective as any other way to perceive the game?

Well, by my own logic, I can't dispute the traditional "fight enemies to win video game" approach as an objectively incorrect way to play the game. If you have Subnautica by whatever means, then you can certainly use the limited tools it offers you to kill any hazardous or non-hazardous creatures you deem fit. You could possibly even use the mods I presume exist that expand the arsenal of conventional weapons you have access to. You're taking an interactive medium and interacting with it how you personally deem fit, in a way that doesn't harm anyone else in any remotely realistic capacity. I can't stop you, or call you an objectively bad person, or even rightly think that much lesser than you.

I can still disagree though, and I'd like to elaborate on why.

Subnautica's lack of conventional weapons or general emphasis on combat is a very deliberate design choice with a very specific point of origin. According to the original game's director Charlie Cleveland, the game was first conceptualized around the time of the Sandy Hook shooting. While recognizing games aren't responsible for these real world atrocities, the idea of making another game that encouraged violent solutions and gun usage wasn't exactly appealing. Instead, Subnautica was made to be a game that encouraged other ways to solve problems. Even the worldbuilding within the game reflects this, as the PDA reveals a terrible massacare led to the banning of fabricating any weapons other than the bare essential survival knife.

This has been the one piece of developer insight on any game that's stuck with me the more than any other. Not to say that I think we should not make games with any kind of guns anymore, that'd be both fruitless and short-sighted. But it's hard for me now to see the world we live in and wonder how we choose to reflect it in the works we create.

For the unfamiliar, I have a few hopeful game projects of my own, one of which is a team-based shooter with the working title "War Bots". It exists as both a love letter to a subgenre I've sunk plenty of hours into enjoying, with the hope to expand and improve on the ideas they present. The violence is intended to be "cartoony", or at least disconnected from realistic violence due to its playable cast being robots and its enemies being hostile plant monsters. Most of their weapons are unrealistically fantastical in some form or function. The overarching story, as pathetically ironic as it may be to try and say, is meant to be a tale warning against mindless violence and mistrust, and that we can only survive by working together to not repeat the mistakes of our past.

I use the tag "war bots" to note my posts showcasing my art and writing about the project. Also using the tag is an entirely unrelated account... using it to discuss developments in drone warfare in the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. I can't say it feels great knowing I'm sharing terminology and concepts with very real atrocities committed daily on real, innocent people, and using them to talk about a video game I want to make. It doesn't feel right to scrap the project after this much effort, but I don't know how much retroactively applying themes and a story will change the fact that it's. A shooter.

Maybe a bit dramatic, but all that is to say I very thoroughly respect and appreciate Subnautica's active design against violence as an intended solution. Beyond the external reasoning and in-universe backstory, the game also has a very palpable friction against using the tools of violence it does offer you. If you do decide to kill a creature much bigger than a Peeper, which is a tedious process that gets exponentially worse with large creatures, then all you're left with is a corpse. No meat, no materials, even if it's something like a Stalker that has some other means of reaping resources from it. It doesn't poof into a convenient cloud of dust, or dissolve into darkness that gives the deed an excuse as part of a grand war of objective "good" and "evil". It simply remains a limp, static body slowly floating down as a reminder of something that did not need to be done, and brought nothing of value from being done anyways. You could scan it more easily than ever, since it can't run away or fight back. What a reward, huh?

So then... why? If nothing is gained, then why is violence still such a popular and desired approach to play the game? And why does it only seem capable of escalating, with it becoming a contest to see what's the biggest creature you can take down, even if the process is just using a Stasis Rifle to stun it indefinitely while you hack away at it with a pocket knife, a grueling tedium that can't possibly bring any joy? Why did those comments reduce this game's unique approach to dealing with innocent animals to simply be a matter of "enemies" and "combat" in the same way that thousands of other games already offer? When the game down to its very heart and soul wants you to get by in any other way, why is there such a pull to take the path of most resistance anyways?

Well, I think one reason is kind of a natural trajectory that comes out of games as a medium, especially those that interact so heavily with online culture, to pressure players into exhausting every possibility a game can provide and then pushing them further. It feels presumptuous to call it "just human nature", as I think the drive to play games as exhaustively as possible doesn't seem to be a universal experience. Instead, I think it's more often prompted by circumstance. An obvious instance is that someone who doesn't play many different games (either by limitations or by choice) and thus would naturally try to get everything possible out of each one. But I think a more common example, especially for a game with a specific history like Subnautica's, is that it comes as a result of online culture. I recall at the end of playthroughs by the big youtubers that skyrocketed the game's popularity, like Markiplier or Jacksepticeye, one of the last things they did before ending their series was to take down the biggest Leviathans they could. Because after all, they did everything else, right? They reached the ending, had plenty of laughs and screams along the way, what's left to do that's worth doing? But viewers liked the video series, why end it if there's anything left to keep it going? And this isn't to say a big youtuber was the first to try and kill a leviathan, it was probably someone who wanted to got bored and/or wanted something to brag about on a subreddit or steam forum. And then with that community aspect, the cycle perpetuates: "if someone else did it, am I really done with the game until I do it too? Am I too much of a coward for not wanting to sink my time into this like other people already have?". And then after the greatest obstacle has been cleared with tedium but relative ease, the pursuit then becomes to go further. Bigger, badder monsters. better weapons. More rules to make it harder. More challenge. More bragging rights. More because More is all there is left to do.

And then so what we're left with is not only the modding scene of the game being so heavily biased towards these sorts of hyper-aggressive additions, but now the desires of many fans for the actual next game are simply just "More To Kill". Not because it's interesting in of itself, but because that's the expectation.

But is it wrong then for people to want this? Well, no, for reasons I already outlined. But I think it is tone deaf to the artistic intent behind the game, and also to what I think makes the game special.

To me, what makes Subnautica such a special game is how beautifully it surrounds you in a believable world that feels both so warmly familiar and yet so alien, without trying to push into an uncanny valley. The flora and fauna of this world look and move so organically similar to life in our own oceans, yet look distinct in a way that feels oddly more charming than offputting in most cases. I think there is some personal bias though, as I could only sleep most nights as a kid with Finding Nemo on my little bedroom TV, and as a result fell in love with marine life and the lovingly rendered ocean environments that Subnautica captures the feeling of so wonderfully. The way the light dances on the sandy sea floors, the vibrant fish and coral. And looking up from this ocean to see a window of light: which in the game is your guiding target as a lifeline to air in your most dire moments, but was just as much a sign of comfort in hardship and the endurance in life in the film. The very nature of light ties the game into some of my fondest memories in such a profound way.

Of course, for as many people who like me are endeared by the ocean environments the game lovingly recreates, just as many are deeply terrified of the endless, unknowable abyss of the ocean, let alone one with even more deliberately horrifying creatures. I think that sort of dichotomy between comfort and fear is something so unique about Subnautica in particular, where its genre is up for debate as a cozy and uniquely nostalgic survival game or a gut-turning horror game just based on your perspective.

I do think Subnautica's breadth of optional mechanics, while technically being what enables turning its creatures into mere "enemies", are another part of what cements it as one of my favorite games ever. The base building mechanics are so needlessly, gloriously in-depth, to where the inevitable bulk of any playthrough for me is working towards creating a comprehensive mega-aquarium of every species I can put in a tank or growbed. There's also the variety of tools that aren't useful enough to keep your precious inventory space open for at all times, but are so fun to play around with needlessly. Not to be a hypocrite, but it's so funny to breed Crashfish and then use the propulsion cannon on them to make an extremely inefficient rocket launcher that takes too much space to reasonably do any useful damage. Alternatively, you could accidentally hit a big angry fish with your car 47 times to where it's so pissed off it dies by its own fault. Highlight of my streaming career. Regardless, the expansive variety of ways the game lets you interact with it is endlessly endearing, both in spite of and because of the fact you're not required to utilize most of them.

But I think one more big reason Subnautica is special is because it defies a conventional game structure of seeing every living thing that opposes you as an "enemy" that's most efficiently dealt with by getting rid of it. Subnautica hopes you see its world as alive, filled with creatures living their lives in the same way you are. Some of them are meant to be food, for you and for other creatures, but that's part of life too. Every simulated ray of light, bed of sand, patch of coral, and motion of creature is delicately crafted to make this planet feel as believable as possible while still making a satisfying play experience. And by doing so, with just these subtle details, the game offers a question of how do you see this planet, and burdens you to consider the consequences of your presence.

I could absolutely go on further about Subnautica, going more broadly into just what I like about it, but I wanted to keep things ""brief"" just to focus on this more specific topic. I might have lost some nuance or couldn't quite elaborate on every little detail, but I didn't want to leave this tumblr post in production for too long. I was tempted to make an extensive Undertale comparison, as another chronically misunderstood game with the appeal of "these aren't just enemies" that gets boiled down by edgy teenage boys to "how much can I stroke my ego by styling and fixating on the hardest arbitrary challenges it can offer" while completely ignoring any kind of nuance or themes aside from maybe digging into Lore (tm) for the sake of Lore (tm), but it felt like too much of a tangent distracting from the actual subject. I do have a more specific post about Undertale/Deltarune's community and poorly aimed focus that I need to rewrite at some point, but that's for another time.

If you read this far, thank you so much for your time, and hopefully you got something out of my rambling here. I don't often do these long "essay" style posts unless I'm particularly inspired, and hoo boy were those trailer comments inspiring. But this took a bit to write out, so hopefully it was coherent enough to read.

All that said though SUBNAUTICA 2 WOOOOOOOO

#a brief piece on:#subnautica #long post

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purplekoop · 24 days ago

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So, for this past October, instead of a daily art challenge, I decided to take the time to instead do something even more seasonally fitting: take the cast for my original (hopeful) platform fighter concept, Darkworld Showdown, and update them to my current art standards. This wasn't just a technical skill showcase of my improvement, as most of these were initially designed years ago and few have been updated since, but also an exercise in how I design characters.

If you'll indulge me, I want to go through some of my more general philosophy on my approach as a character designer, and how I applied my approach to the Darkworld Showdown cast. Not just in terms of general character design principles, but also my specific goals when designing a fighting game cast with distinct thematic and stylistic goals and inspirations. So, here is:

A Brief Piece on Darkworld Showdown, Design Goals, and How to Make a Cast to Care About

For some brief context if anyone is unfamiliar, Darkworld Showdown is planned to be a platform fighter (gameplay ala Smash Bros), but with a cast based on horror icons, monsters, and all manner of other spooky or freaky creatures. It was originally conceived as a much less thematically specific platform fighter as an open playing ground for new concepts, but the idea struggled to feel satisfying without something cohesive to bind the cast together. Crossover fighters like Smash get away with stylistic contrast, but their rosters are still bound together by some sort of common ground, even as broad as just being existing video game characters.

While uncertain about this lack of an identity, I learned about Darkstalkers, a wild traditional fighting game with a cast of outlandish but broadly spooky fighters including a vampire, a martial artist wolfman, a succubus who turns her wings into rocket boosters, and...

Others.

But Darkstalkers, and to a lesser extent Skullgirls (itself a spiritual successor to Darkstalkers, though with less defined horror theming) were the main catalyst for the horror trope theming. But not only was there that basic inspiration, I also wanted to try and replicate how their casts took those broad concepts and made them into appealing, distinct characters. Well. beyond just. revealing outfits and sultry poses.

So with that, there's three main traits that I'd say make a DWS character work: Horror, Comedy, and a third thing I don't know how to sum up in one snappy word.

The first part is pretty simple: on a basic level, a character needs to fit the "Horror" theme to fit into the cast. They don't actually need to be scary, they just need to fit the aesthetic enough to feel cohesive with the rest of the cast. This is in a very broad sense, as very few of them would really fit into a modern definition of a horror film. A lot are based on more classic horror characters with famous early film adaptations: werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein's monster, that sort of thing. Nea sneaks in primarily by being based on Godzilla, whose original film was much more of a horror film than most of the character's later usage. Aside from that, a lot of the cast is much more broad "spooky" archetypes. I don't think most people this century are really scared by witches, but Molly doesn't feel too tangentially out of place.

A character can't be too removed from the implications of "horror" though. Mugie, the slime girl, is a very cutesy character, and slime as a sort of cultural character nowadays is more of a fantasy creature. But to avoid her being too "clean" to fit in the cast, I had the idea of giving her a metal device that acts as her sort of harness, which not only gives a point of contrast to separate her limbs and make her animations more readable, but also adds something "off" to the design. It's the kind of elegant visual element that begs a viewer to ask a simple question, and even without getting the actual unsettling answer, the imagination could gather context that naturally might lead to a similarly unpleasant conclusion.

"Comedy" meanwhile might be a surprising factor to consider so highly. This is also a major aspect of Darkstalkers and Skullgirls that doesn't get discussed too much, which is shocking given how much those games thrive on comedy for shaping their characters. This is mostly done with animation, with goofy attacks or expressions when getting hit. Skullgirls has one of my favorite examples that combines fanservice with horror and comedy: Eliza has a special move called Osiris Spiral where she unfurls her upper body to attack, revealing her sentient skeleton underneath, but poses like it's a strip tease. It's such a great showcase of personality for a character who dances between flirty and morbid on a whim, in a way that sums up to be an incredibly amusing visual pun.

It seems like an obvious priority to make a character look as cool as possible to make them appealing, especially in a fighting game, and I certainly do also try to make characters look conventionally cool where it's appropriate. But making a character "funny" in some way, in concept or if only for a brief freeze frame, often has the very useful effect of releasing tension. If you can take a step back and admit the absurdity of the characters you're playing as, that can be a welcome reminder to not take things too seriously, which I think is a useful quality for a player-versus-player game. Plus, having something to laugh at with your friends is better than just laughing at it by yourself.

What gives that "comedy" value to a character can vary. Some characters, like Frankenscrap, are goofy in all aspects from visual design, personality, moveset, and movement. Other characters were designed around their puns, like Shadow Boxer or Pokerface, so they're kind of a walking joke, even if they can also have serious moments. Some characters also have very obvious visual gags, like Molly having a mop instead of a broom, or just the presence of Duster as part of Evelyn's moveset. Sometimes the comedy is subjective; Helen started out in part because I thought the idea of someone being a werewolf but only on one limb was funny, especially with the context of her being a trained monster hunter who very visibly messed up once. She was originally meant to be more serious in terms of personality, but this didn't feel right with her goofier concept, plus felt too close to Vivienne. With those two intended to have interactions in the story, it felt odd having two of the few serious characters in the cast have a dynamic together.

Comedy is hard to define though, and even what I think is "funny" about a character isn't a universal truth. Another way to frame it might be "absurdity", with how sometimes the characters are so extreme in some aspect that it feels like the presumed reading is to find it funny. Road Rage is my example of a character that's so extreme, that it feels like you have to either assume it's absurdity to have a giant zombie armadillo with half a motorcycle lodged through his torso, or accept him as the coolest thing ever.

The last core principle I think every character needs for this cast is hard to put into a word. It's the vague factor that they not only are characters, but characters you can root for or otherwise be fond of in a way that makes them enticing to play as.

To put it in other words, it's in part making the character "relatable" in one way or another. This is easy to do with characters that are humanoid outright, we naturally can gravitate to what we can recognize as human, but in a cast this varied there's some characters that could easily be too far removed to recognize easily as something to relate to. Warpmaw is the biggest example: designing it was a tricky balance between selling it as an unsettling creature while still making it enough of a clear personality to latch onto. The key there was in the mouth: despite all the almost otherworldly elements, between the multiple types of tentacles and the unreadable rows of eyes, there's still one very obvious (and namesake) element that gives it a personality we can recognize and potentially sympathize with to some degree. Another small detail with a similar effect is Hyvera's hair. It's one simple element that kind of hits all three of these points (comedy, horror, and relatability) all at once just by the implication that what otherwise looks like a cyborg bug creature used to be a normal human. First it's funny the bee creature has a human haircut, then it's horrifying to consider the implications of that, but then it serves as a grounding element that shows there's something in there to sympathize with.

The goal of "relatability" as a core design principle is one that I think is vital to any game with an assorted cast of selectable playable characters. The ability to choose a character is a simple but powerful means of self expression in a game, more potent than just having a favorite character in another medium. There's a more tactile sense of connection: even in some brief, distant way, you become the character, and to give players a choice on what they become can give them an incredibly effective way to become invested. This is in part why character creators are so beloved, but those tend to lose some emotional power due to the lack of universal recognizability. A character made to represent yourself is one thing, but to be attached to something other people can recognize and have a connection to more similar to yours is something also special. There's a unique pride in being able to look at a lineup and point at your guy, but also have other people share in that same sort of connection.

To enable this kind of connection, you not only need characters that are possible to relate to, but to have a variety that different people can relate to. If you're going to give players options, then they should be an array of options, so making characters distinct and varied is vital. I tend to be a fan of exaggerating as much as possible to help accomplish this, giving every character some field they can be extreme in unique to them. Giving characters strong shape language can help (Frankenscrap got the praise of "he's so shaped" from multiple sources so that's a good sign), as can giving them other distinct visual traits. Some characters don't need any help with standing out, but for the multiple relatively normal humanoid feminine characters, I erred on the side of caution by giving them each unique standout traits. Diabla has her big bulky build and large horns, Molly is plus sized and has her hard-to-miss hat, Vivienne has her cape and tall, poised stature, Helen has her massive arm and ponytail, and Nea has her athletic build and long spindly tail in her base form. I briefly considered giving Nea horns or Helen a tail while updating them, but felt that would make them stand out less. Part of this goal is also for gameplay reasons, as giving a character a strong, well-defined silhouette makes it clear both who they are and what they're doing, which is vital in any player-versus-player context, especially in something like a team battle or free for all match. But if you're going to make a character in the hopes someone latches onto them as a special favorite, they have to stand out enough to feel properly special.

I could definitely go on about more specific aspects of these designs, both broadly and on specific characters, but I wanted to focus on these main three design principles. It's important to note that these are very specific principles to Darkworld Showdown, unique to its thematic identity, tone, and gameplay goals. Other projects can and should have principles tailored to them specifically. Even something as seemingly broad as relatability isn't essential for every character design. Pokemon for instance are made to be broadly appealing with a wide range of designs to be invested in, but the goal isn't necessarily to relate to them, but rather to, as former official designer James Turner roughly said, to make it so there's someone out there who wants to be friends with them. Anthropomorphism can help with this, but isn't essential. There's also of course designing a character not made to be sympathetic or relatable, namely antagonists.

But what makes it so fun designing characters for Darkworld Showdown, and analyzing those of its inspirations, is that balancing act of seemingly counterintuitive requirements. To have a single design that's unsettling, comical, and someone you still can somehow see yourself in, along with any specific goals for certain designs in particular. It's also fun making a varied cast by balancing these elements in different quantities to get different impressions in the end result.

So yeah, thank you to anyone who read this far and let me indulge in my sort of roundabout bragging. Spooky day is here on the east coast, and with it I ironically bring this monthly personal challenge to a close in advance. Don't worry, DWS isn't going anywhere for too long, definitely not a full year, but I do want to take some time to relax and potentially tackle some other, more casual art projects. In the meantime, this is a post series I guess! There's something else fitting the date in a different way that I want to make A Brief Piece On for next, but that may be a bit longer, and is going to be more like the Subnautica piece in a few ways. Until then though, thanks for reading!

#a brief piece on:#darkworld showdown #character design #my art

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