The Blade in the Bark
DigiPen - Sophomore Game Project
Role: Co-Designer & Producer
The Team
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Joanna Robb - Co-Designer
Kyler Elmer - Physics & Sound Programmer Jason Bray - Core Engine & Lighting Programmer Carsten Ronshaugen - Sound Designer |
Michael 'Miki' Bishop - Art Lead & Character Artist
Kailey Hara - Creature Artist Roxanne Sparks - Environment & Prop Artist Fernanda Coelho - Environment & Prop Artist |
Very Severe Winter by Jakub Rozalski. Joanna Robb and I showed this painting to the team during our first meeting to illustrate the way we wanted the game to feel. Click to see more of Jakub Rozalski's work!
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Core DesignThe design for The Blade in the Bark was a collaborative effort between Joanna Robb and I. We wanted to create a game that felt natural, where the mechanics and the gameplay felt diegetic. We took inspiration from games like Bloodborne and The Witcher 3 for their deliberate and brutal combat. During our first meeting I realized that a mechanic I'd been sitting on in an old concept document was perfect for the game, a sword that only appears while in moonlight.
The sword helped us create the design we had wanted. We decided the player should never be able to block, only dodge. We believed that this would create interesting tension, as moonlight would be needed to attack, but since you could never defend you couldn't stand still in one pool of it. The design of the wolves in turn was meant to hem in the amount of space the player could take advantage of by circling the player. |
PrototypingAlong with discussing the core design and the world of the game, both Joanna Robb and I set about prototyping gameplay over the summer. My prototype ended up pretty bare as I was holding down a full time job, but it gave me a good taste of what ideas worked and which didn't.
When the semester began, Joanna Robb and I took a look at each other's work and discussed what each of us had done best in our prototypes. While the engine was being developed we set about making a combined prototype, where Joanna would script the player code, and I would script the wolves. |
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Level Design
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NarrativeWhen the project began we didn't want the game to have a strong narrative. We even had discussions about whether the game should have any dialogue at all. However, we knew that we wanted the art and the player's journey to be grounded in something. We wanted it to feel more grounded and important than 'go deep into the woods and kill the monster.' To accomplish this, Joanna Robb and I spent a good chunk of time during preproduction building the world of The Blade in the Bark.
My primary inspiration that I brought to the table was the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series by Fritz Leiber. I've always loved the world of Nehwan which is so different than what we often times think of as fantasy today. It has a very classic sword and sorcery feel to it, where the world is dangerous and consistently strange. I drew from one story in particular, The Seven Black Priests. It featured faces made of flesh colored stone that jutted from a winter landscape, their eyes staring with malevolent intent. I wanted the antagonistic force in our game, the Darkness, to have a feeling similar to this. I wanted it to be terrifying and evil, but in a way where it was simply its nature. This, in combination with Lovecraft-ian influence, led to the idea that the Darkness is the dreams of an imprisoned God under the mountain. If left alone it will wake, but it does not act with intent, rather its very being taints the land and searches for escape. This is something we never explicitly state in the game, but I believe that these kind of details that we discussed internally created much of the richness of setting that can be found in the game. |
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Scripting
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