Dishonored and Stealth

Although I liked Dishonored and got a kick out of teleporting everywhere, it didn't really feel like a stealth game. I think the problem stems from the fact that, for me, stealth is all about dis-empowerment. A stealth game is supposed to limit the player by taking away control and forcing the player to think of more covert ways to deal with the situation.

When you are playing as the Corvo Ortano imbued with magic and you are given a multitude of powers everything suddenly becomes completely open. Dishonored literally gives you a new perspective of stealth as you blink to pipelines and possess rats to quickly get around any area and enemy. I felt that the game doesn't adhere to the slow and atmospheric nature of what stealth usually feels like.

Dishonored was marketed as having an open environment where you can take any approach whether overt or covert. The problem is is that Dishonored does exactly that. As the game is balanced to suit more than one play style it doesn't offer you a challenge in terms of stealth. The enemies are too easy to kill or avoid and there is little consequence if you do get caught. The only consequences come from at the end where it lists all of your actions in the game. Stealth felt like it was only tied to this list rather than the narrative of the game.

Zelda Wind waker

Sarah showed us these bird people from the game Zelda Windwaker. I've never played this game so it was interesting in seeing the game's visual style. I really like the aesthetics of the game, the character's and the textures are really stylized and unique.
As we are also making anthropomorphic bird character's I thought it was great to see how other people have managed to do it.
I think games like these are timeless as they aren't held back by any visual capabilities. It won't age like games that use realism as realistic things tend to get better over time.

The Elder Bird

Here is the final concept for the Elder Bird I painted during class.

Issues with Character Design

I've been trying to get my head around where to place bird wings on a character with human arms. It seems deceptively simple. Since this character the village elder, is more bird-like than the younger one, Daryl came up with idea that as they grow older they develop more bird like features, I had the idea of placing his wings between the middle and ring finger.
 I looked at bats and pterodactyl's to see how this would work and when I was finally happy with that, I began on the wing design. I looked at bats again, and magpie's and butterflies. I liked the idea that the wings would start of like a bats, sharp and rough wings then end like a magpie's more round and soft wings.
I went a bit over the top with the concept as we might use these designs for the temple walls.

I looked at butterflies to get an idea of the design of the cloak he would wear. Initially I used the cloak to hide his bird features to make him look more human. I liked the patterns of butterfly wings and tried to design something like it. As he was a village elder, his cloak would represent the village and its culture, so I designed some simple bird patterns. I did two colour variations and the group liked the brown one so we went with that.