Game, Story and Art Style Influence

The biggest influences on my game would be Exhumed and Metroid Prime for gameplay. Neon Genesis Evangelion Rebuild and Second Sight for art style. Halo 4 for Narrative style and delivery. I’ll go over each IP to explain fully.

Exhumed aka Power Slave

I probably the biggest influence on my game overall. Properly showing my age with this one, I was playing this game in my teenage years on the Sega Saturn. I picked it up cheap in a saturday marking in Kent England no clue what type of game it was. Boy was I lucky, a real surprise for me. It’s basically a mix of old school Doom, Egypt history and Castlevania style progression. The graphics weren’t ground breaking but the execution of the gameplay was so good. My brother and I played this for hours. It’s still very good today, worth a play on PC if you have the chance. Loved the exploration and puzzles. A good amount of gun battles and actually worked pretty well on the Sega Satrun control pad before analogue sticks became common place.

Metroid Prime

I played the original release on the Nintendo Game Cube. Now I’m enjoying the remaster on the Switch. The game still holds up today. It’s a lofty goal but I’d like the graphic quality of Phantom Complex to be at this level. The remaster looks excellent on The switch and runs at 60fps. So there’s hope I can achieve the same level of graphical quality and performance.

At it’s core Metroid Prime is an adventure / exploration type of game. It just so happens to be an FPS. It’s similar to Exhumed. Lots of platforming sections, back tracking to open up new areas, solve simple puzzles etc. choosing to be an FPS cuts down on the amount of animation to be done. Also saves a lot of headaches getting the player camera to play nice with the environment. Whilst designing Phantom Complex I came to similar conclusions. I’m a team of one for now so I need to play to my strengths. An FPS adventure game makes a lot of sense for Metroid Prime and I’ll look to replicate some of it’s success in Phantom Complex.

Neon Genesis Evangelion Rebuild

This one is for all the die hard anime fans out there. This anime series / film series had a profound effect on me. I watch the Rebuild movie series at least once a year and still find interesting visual and story elements over a decade later.

You can find out more about this film series here - Evangelion: 1.0 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 + 1.01

I simply love the aesthetics of the film series. It’s very minimal with great composition and use of subtle nad vibrant colours. The world has a massive sense of scale through out. While presented largely in wide screen format. I really hope to replicate this with my game. I feel the visual style lends itself to low poly scene construction. I hope to bring my game project to switch platforms without out compromise.

Second Sight

I was very fortunate to see this game before it came out. Although I didn’t know the game at the time. Pretty sure the guy broke NDA to show us but I’m grateful. While at university we had various industry professionals come in. We got to chat to a 3D animator from Free Radical Design. Really cool experience. What stuck with me was the character designs and the animation style. Characters from their games had humanoid proportions but the animation was similar to classic animated films like The Iron Giant, Titan A.E. or Anistasia. It was over expressive like Disney but not aiming for photorealism. In modern gaming Over Watch, Fortnite and league of legends would be the closest in terms of animation. I hope to get to this level of quality with my project Phantom Complex.

Halo 4

I’m probably in the minority for this, but I really like Halo 4 for it story delivery. The interactions between Master Chief and Cortana is just incredible to me. The cut scenes are just pure cinematic gold. The writing is so beautiful the voice actors for Master chief and Cortana really brought their “A” game. What I love most about Halo in general is the in game voice acting that helps to progress the story while not overriding the gameplay. I’m not a fan of modern day heavy narrative driven games. They end up being more film than a game. This has spilled over in to 2.5D platform games that prioritise cinematography over gameplay. Great to look at but gameplay just seem like a chore only to get to the next visually pleasing shot. Even with film the cinematography is meant to serve the story not its own gratification. For me cinematography / cut scene in games is meant to serve the gameplay progression. I get the heavy swing towards film like features but this comes at a cost of game identity. Modern games have spent too much time trying to get acceptance from fellow piers in film than just solidifying it’s own place. The games industry is now bigger than Hollywood. Games industry no longer needs their acceptance it’s probably the other way round now.

I’ve set out some high marks to achieve with Phantom Complex. If I aim for the stars but only reach Mars that’s still a massive achievement. Instead of standing still on the pavement in Croydon town centre.

Onwards and upwards.