Designing a Speculative Port for All Will Rise

Speaking of a city like Muziris requires more than just architecture. And like I described the early thoughts behind the visual language, our goal is to create a believable speculative world. It requires a grounded reality that immerses players into believing that they should care about the world and its future. Tough ask. That.

As soon as I started I knew All Will Rise was going to be one of the most interesting design challenges I had faced so far. Point being, there are some ‘extra’ bright minds writing and thinking this world. And I really wanted to match up to the standards from the get go.

I don’t get to work with a team like this everyday. So there I went. Galavanting down the corridors of ideas. Looking for things to impress them with 🙂

The first brief, a little overwhelming is for a panoramic shot of a port. You can see a distant glimpse of a river on fire, but the world still moves on.

Now. The idea here is to construct a coastal environment that feels dense, political, lived-in, and layered with history. To us this is about coexistence. Myriad systems and histories compressed into a single frame.

The brief reminded of my visit to a temple in Kanchivaram. Standing there, I had felt, this immense feeling of wonder. The more-then-a-thousand-years-old architecture was alive. And there were enough stories on those walls to fill my spiritual practice all the way to nirvana. Though, as you might notice, I decided to indulge in the side quest of being an artist and delay that eventuality.

I can assure you that it was my loss that I did not stay and absorb the magnitude of the achievement for more then a day. But the place has stayed with me. The fact that it had casually witnessed whole mythologies come and go, kingdoms born and withered, and millions dreamt, prayed and perished on its stone floor. While those walls just stood there. I know there are many old and ancient sites that I myself have visited, but there was something else in that space. A rarer spirit that I can not explain.

When I was walking around the sacntum in that massive summer heat, barefoot with blisters, something crossed my eye that I had not seen before. Really. It was a pigment of orangish-red. A colour I had never seen before or since. I think it was a pigment that had escaped the fingers of ASI technicians and had remained pure and true to its original colour from centuries. But that is my assumption. That colour felt old. It had a hidden description of culture in it.

That is what I wanted to capture in the image of the harbour. This pigment that feels like it belongs to another time. Something that I am not sure of, but it exists.

I usually start my images in trying to translate feelings into sketches. Just thoughts of the heard. Sometimes described by shapes, sometimes by details. And in this case, I was looking for the people who inhabit these parts and the kind of architecture they cross.

Once I had the sketches, I used those as modular pieces to put together a rough layout. This is not literal, because we were not creating modular assets, but only to assess how things relate to each other. Honestly, at this stage, I’m not thinking about aesthetics. We can always make things look ‘pretty’ later. I’m thinking more about the presence of the harbour. What needs to exist in this space for it to feel like a real place.

While the previous sketch feels more flat like a side scroller, based on some feedback, I also explored a more dynamic depth. And added a slight angle toward the right, as if the buildings were getting closer to camera and you could look inside the shops. But scale and perspective are demons of a different nature.

A rough exercise in depth blocking, only to understand how deep the image looks. Darkest elements come forward. Lightest elements recede. Atmospheric depth, and all that.

What I am trying to do, is study if the image reads at all and if the layers are visible.

Colour is usually where things start to break for me. Usually. My first instinct is always excess. Too much colour. Too many ideas. Too many possibilities competing for attention. Just like the places I live in. A harmonious chaos.

As you will see later, in this case, I also had a brief encounter with a fantastical pink tone over this world (A vision of the wonderful Joost) But we decided to pull back from there because the world needed to feel grounded.

Now that the rough colours are in place. Somewhat. I started thinking about more details and more speculative elements. To me the above versions felt a little barren. A little more like a village rather then a city with history.

It felt like a place. But not a story.

So to bring in some more elements of interest into the picture I added a tidal energy generator on the right and more local details. While leaving the rest of the port intact. Going back to the brief; along with being a port/harbour, this is also a place that is constantly in transition. This is where the fisher folk earn their livelihood from, this is where the jetty runs from, et cetera.

Once the world is defined, the rest is a linear journey of rendering the colours. And make it ‘aesthetic.’ Even in the chaos of what it is. As you can see in the above images, and few below, that I am trying really hard to make sense of that fantastical pink. And it, border line, works. But it also feels a little out there. Crossing the realm of make belief.

And like I said in the art direction post, this is a believable make-belief world in a fictitious land seeking to immerse the player fully. So I brought back to a more realistic tone of colours. I think this is a thin line, sort of like how Tekkonkinkreet merges the realm of fantasy and reality.

And so this landscape came to be.