Moving forward with my design process based on the previous set-up of self-governed principles in the last blog post separating perceptions and symptoms as well as possible resolutions to questions pondered about how this particular cognitive disorder could be represented as a monstrous antagonistic creature I began to develop quick thumbnails.
I began with a thick black marker to produce silhouettes, a method established by many contemporary concept artists, though I found myself struggling with this process - perhaps because I had more restrictive guidelines and ideas around what could be included in the design than what concept artists who use this method do or maybe I was intentionally crafting the thumbnails whilst relying too heavily on the anatomy and aesthetics of current animals chosen to represent qualities of the symptoms. Observing these issues during the process allowed me to question the application of these representative features and what could be changed in future iterative sketches.
I found myself thumbnailing creatures that looked too similar, either a giant squid-like creature or a giant moth not allowing myself to utilise the independent anatomy of tentacles and compulsion to be the only feature necessary in the beast to represent the disorder. Though a giant squid living within a shell to hoard its stolen items works to represent the symptoms of the disorder I feel further experimentation with the design process could produce a more sinister creature that exaggerates the symptoms to a more antagonistic standard. I questioned whether the tentacles could be a mouthpiece however this would imply they were used to gather food which is a necessary object to take for sustenance, kleptomaniacs take things they don't need and the idea behind using them to represent the disorder is that they would latch on to parts of the environment and unintentionally take pieces of the environment with them as they moved along, an uncontrollable behavior that occurred only due to the adhesive quality of the tentacle as it grabbed onto things, released to then again attach to a new object. Imagine a chimp swinging from tree to tree with its palms constantly producing a glue-like substance that collected bark from the branches it swung from.
I had observed how the flesh between tentacles could be stretched and morphed at will by octopuses and squids to alter their form even looking like wings in some cases, therefore it could take the appearance of a moth in some instances, and again this is too restrictive for the end form as there is no reasonable necessity for the creature to be in this form just to represent these two creatures at once.
I produced a quick observational sketch of an octopus in a foreboding pose to evoke a sense of the creature being sinister so I could gain an understanding of how the tentacles could be applied to a creature to feed into this aesthetic which serendipitously had me posing the question of multiple limbs being used to grab more unnecessary items after seeing a similar aesthetic on a boss in the Elden Ring game of all places.
Godrick the Grafted is a boss from the Elden Ring game, a character with the status of demi-god who has taken to grafting limbs and other appendages from fallen foes and creatures so as to gain more power/strength, especially in terms of the dragons head he has attached and utilises in the later stages of the battle. However, it is also speculated that this process is undertaken to alleviate his own shortcomings with the character often looked down on by other shard bearers and divine individuals. There is also a sense of hoarding and secrecy with this character who has large quantities of fallen foes' carcasses and cadavers hidden away in the basement of the fortress with which he resides, they are not proud of the extent to which this habit has reached. It led to me looking at spiders weaving webs to thread through extra limbs to attach to themselves to enable more items to be stolen and have the silhouette or thumbnail gain a more spider-like or crab-like appearance. The growth suggested in my previous mind-map to represent the snowball effect of the disorder becoming a larger and larger issue if left unchecked could now be represented by an ever-expanding number of extra limbs instead of just physical growth. This abnormality in appearance would both increase the sinister look as well as represent this growing issue symptom.
This new avenue of design allowed me the permission to craft thumbnails in my normal blue sketches with a more insect-based aesthetic which are conventionally seen as creepy and evoke emotions relevant to the style I was seeking. I could also experiment with the 'shell' feature, in this case, looking at a skull to give off the feeling of a sinister creature as well as tie into the theme of these disorders having a negative connotation when it comes to their interactions with humans, but depending on how large this creature is I could continue to design a variety of different objects as the shell, looking at the hermit crab in Fallout 4/ Fallout 76 for inspiration and how due to the radioactive mutation increasing its size, had sought out abandoned vehicles to use as a shell could offer interesting design iterations (a skull would imply giants reside within this world if the creature was as large as I currently perceive it to be, which I'm not averse to but would like to seek other alternatives before concluding this design with a new implication like this being added to the worldbuilding).
More questions would now need to be resolved during the process of thumbnailing and refining ideas to understand how this creature and shell would appear and interact with the world i.e what environments does it commonly reside in (based on the real-world commonality of the disorder), how large do I envision it to be (dictates what type of limbs and appendages it grafts), how well are they grafted on (it possibly needs the appendages more for moving due to the weight of the shell getting heavier from hoarding rather than having access to stealing more things since kleptomaniacs don't pre-meditate their thefts so the limbs need to avoid being an appearance of gaining an ability to steal more), how do I incorporate the idea of moths/ infant offspring being drawn to the creature to represent compulsion or can this idea be remedied in a new alternative way that fits this new aesthetic more successfully.
Another area of the design process I feel I am lacking or not paying enough information to are the mechanics of the creature during an encounter. By this I mean in certain boss battles in games such as Dark Souls, Metroid Prime, Hollow Knight, or Mario the bosses have certain choices made in their design that reflect how to defeat them through a certain mechanic built into the design and development of the boss. For example, the Mirror Knight in Dark Souls 2 has a unique mechanic where it slams its mirror shield down on the ground and an additional enemy can travel through it into the boss arena, if online play is active this enemy can be another player drawn into this world (PvP through connected worlds is a key design choice in this franchise) so the design of the knight having a mirror shield to function like this was a purposeful choice, there are a number of other alternatives that could have successfully fit this mechanic such as a mage who could open portals, etc, yet the choice of a mirror than gets reflected into how the knight looks with polished armour, the mirror is a shield so obviously a knight is carrying it, there then becomes a sense of vanity about the character so how else can this be established in both design and narrative additions through lore.
This way of thinking during my design process is not essential - the creatures in Monster Hunter don't follow this trend, though it is observed that a mechanic in the game is to cut the tail from larger creatures to gain more loot during the battle, none of them have designs that are based on mechanics in the same way as the previously mentioned examples, they are more designed around their abilities and environments such as tundra based monsters having more fur, volcanic based creatures have rocky hides and poisonous creatures tend to emit a gaseous substance coloured to stand out from the local environment during the encounter so as to make it stand out to the player as something to avoid. The reason I even contemplate this option is that there is a possibility to utilise this feature as a way to show the player how understanding the symptoms of cognitive disorders can help them either remedy them for sufferers or destroy the disparity between perceptions of sufferers that cause stigma and the symptoms themselves, a mechanic the player engages with has a substantially increased chance of a lasting outcome outside of the game if both memorable in experience and meaningful in its approach to successfully representing the goal of alleviating these factors in the issue at hand which is one of the main goals of the development of this project in my learning agreements. The addition of wild and domesticated versions of generalised anxiety showcases the difference between these two ideas of disorders but doesn't resolve the issue even if it does direct the player to form the idea of perceptions being based on human conventions crafted by non-sufferers and how monstrous the symptoms actually are, a quick study of the dermatillomania with this new mechanic incorporated could have the player finding a way to remove the dead skin or smooth out the scales in some way but may force the player to operate in a way that doesn't fit the style of game I originally intended to make, moving further away from the Monster Hunter style game. That particular game was used as a way of reference due to the monsters causing issues with their intrusion into the humans' way of life either through destructive or infestive means. Similar to how disorders can be destructive to a sufferer's everyday way of life, or how some can infest an individual's mind with negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The idea of removing materials gained from defeating the creatures to craft weapons and armor to assist in future battles would possibly be deemed null if the player was almost rescuing the creatures from their impulses, or symptoms. They are simply an entity that represent the symptoms and not the individual suffering from them so the mechanic would, if included, need to continue this theme a mechanic would have to assist the player in defeating the creature and not allow the creature to exist without the symptoms. If the shell of the Kleptomania creature could be destroyed it would no longer be able to produce the toxic gas that represents the theft that removes the tension from the compulsion moths which would allow the creature to move quicker. A good game allows the player to remove one ability but in doing so it should increase another to maintain or increase a challenge fairly, akin to the second stage of a boss battle, think Orenstein and Smough in Dark Souls 1 where the challenge is facing two bosses at once when one is defeated it absorbs the other and gains some of their abilities to maintain the challenge and force the player to adapt to the new boss with the skills gained from facing the previous two. Removing the skull would not alleviate the symptoms - finding and highlighting kleptomaniacs' hoarded thefts would cause great shame to the individual that they had feared for the duration of the disorder, I believe this would halt their immediate compulsion to steal (the toxic gas) but could increase heart rate, anxiety, and tension (more moth creatures due to no gas being produced) so the creature moves faster to emulate this heart rate and attempt to outrun the compulsiveness of the disorder whilst also increasing its movements and attacks. Now this is just an initial idea for one creature so I am well aware it's most likely not the most successful integration of this type of mechanic nor a feature that could be included with every creature so eventually could be dropped, however, this way of thinking could offer new alternatives during the design process that could lead to developing a more successful project in line with my learning agreement to produce a product that is of a pro-social nature and makes attempts to solve societal issues through gameplay mechanics and conceptual designs. Linking this back to the previous design insight, if the shell is something that can be destroyed during the battle, what objects can be used by the creature as a shell now have new limits and restrictions placed upon them.
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