Memorium is a video game developed by Ominous Orcas that aims to take fishing and turn it into combat. The game has a narrative that changes depending on the choices the player makes and each fight is unique with different challenges to face. Memorium combines 2D and 3D elements to create a unique world.
Inspiration
At the beginning of the project I was tasked with designing the bosses for the game and was given the guidelines of needing to look like fish while also looking monstrous. Reference I pulled was multiple different kinds of deep sea fish for early ideas.
Games like Subnautica and Dredge were also used as inspiration for the early monster designs.
Early Enemy Concept Art
Later iterations there was an idea combine human features with the fish to make them more monstrous. As the story was being developed as I was trying to get an idea for what the fish will look like, it was a later decision to have the fish have more human features and for later bosses to be more fish-like.
These first couple of drawings were to give my team an idea of where my head was going and were made with the intention of getting feedback for what was people liked and what they didn’t.
My thought process was seeing how I could combine different fish together. These were also made with just getting ideas out rather than what is feasible to actually make in game .
Tutorial Boss – The Wailer
This boss specifically was inspired by a beta fish and was the first model that was made and was built to also test the pipeline for future enemies. Everything was done in Maya with the exception of textures being hand painted in Photoshop in order to match the 2D style of the sprites.
This design was chosen as the test run because it was one of the simplest ideas I had that in terms of modeling and rigging would allow me to learn rigging and to get an understanding of my personal pipeline along with how it will fit in with the overall team pipeline.
The hair/fins of this fish were originally supposed to look more like hair. I had recently done work in Houdini and wanted to try doing a hair simulation for the fish. However their were multiple technical issues, such as poly count, it didn’t look the way I wanted it to, and not having the correct houdini license in order to get an easy working pipeline between houdini, maya, and unity. I was also running out of time as I still needed to rig this fish, so I ended up not doing the hair idea and just making it one big fin, as the human face was the main goal of this fish.
This fish was based off of the old concept art made during brainstorming where it was partially inspired by a the concept of the man-faced stinkbug, but instead a man faced fish. The betta fish was intentional as the fins were large flowy fins that betta fish have were supposed to mimic hair so when faced forward the fish would look like a floating head.
The first version of this fish was very low poly and the goal for me was to get a model that had base structure that I wanted and that was rigged. I was relearning how to rig for this fish specifically so I was worried about having enough time, to model, rig, animate, and texture the fish. The textures being one of my last priorities.
This is the first test of the game that has the bare bones needed to run combat. The first issues that were run into was the 3D not meshing with the 2D especially the enemy boss that I made. One of the main issues was the textures and the other was that it was too geometric/low poly that it doesn’t match the hand drawn sprites.
The textures were easier to fix than the model, so those were the first changes, as I didn’t want to change the model until I started editing the rig, as I would had to redo parts of the rig if I changed the model too much.
I downloaded the brushes that they used and matched the coloring more. As the colors were more vibrant and the fins looked more orange in Mai’s art. I looked at how Maple drew the eyes the most as that was one of the focal points of the tutorial boss that was the clearest as to not matching with the sprites.
For the textures I looked at our 2D sprite artist and art lead, Maple’s cutscene work and dialogue box art to try and match for the new textures.
First Boss – The Grasping One
This is the first official boss in Memoriam, a game about fighting fish. When I was thinking of a design for this fish I looked at the game script to see where the location of the fight would take place, which is on the mountains. I then researched mountain fish and looked through images of fish that looked the most interesting, I landed on the sockeyed salmon as the main inspiration for this model.
There was less conceptual art done for this as there wasn’t enough time to try and iterate through a bunch of versions. For this model I used an older model of a hand that I made and duplicated and extended it for arms and placed it into the mouth of the fish body. The idea I had was to separate the head of the fish to be hands and the rest to be a regular fish body.
Final Boss – Methuseluh
This is the final boss for the game Memoriam, a game where you fight fish monsters. There was a lot of ideation for this boss monster. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this boss to be distinct from other future bosses. The story that was given was that it is a god locked behind a door that is asking the player to find fish and fight them. The original idea I had was to try to take inspiration from mythology, specifically Japanese dragons, as there were previous ideas of having Japan as the location of the game. However that idea was scrapped, so I was more moving into something completely monstrous and %100 fish.
There was some ideating on how this fish would move, specifically for how the mouth would move, as it has two mouths that are stacked like Russian nesting dolls. There has been basic textures added and a basic rig done but final versions of either have not been implemented yet. The modeling process was very long, and I think there parts that I did that was inefficient, specifically with the swirling body fin. If I were to do this again I would want to take more time in learning how to do procedural modeling.
