Darksiders 2 - The Scribe

Hello the intertubes! sorry for the brief lapse of promised content! Today I wanted to share the Scribe! My brief for the character was a fat fat corrupted angel who had sat on his angelic throne for eons recording the histories of heaven. He needed to come across as a villain, but also to convey a sense of helplessness when his boss fight was over.

These were the explorations presented to the team to consider. Other more crazy and far out versions where done but later regarded as outside what the team wanted to accomplish with the character. We needed our floating fat man to be just that for this role!

He aslo had a more disgusting face and was blind early on. After a few itterations though we had the problem of not feeling sorry for him anymore when he pleaded for his life at the end of the fight. We needed a human face to empathyse with.

So we made other aspects of the character more monstrous and supernaturally dangerous instead. It was suggested that we have corruption tentacles spew out of his gut and attack death. These were a few ideas about how that could look. 

At one point we also considered giving him magical arms that could appear to do some epic smashing. I favored the idea that they would be made out of the pages of the library's books he wrote his many prophecies in.

While the team considered how these two systems could work for gameplay and what our technical constraints were i moved on to the final concept with all my direction in mind. 

This is a WIP of the final when I was originally going for a darker look for a corrupted angel. I keyed off of some the darker colors found on Abandon from the first game in his corrupted state. 

In the end we decided it was best to have him built out of normal angelic colors to help convey that he was still an fundamentally an angel. We could let the corruption goo and all the muck that shot out of this stomach tell the story of his fallen state visually.

This is was the final concept piece.

And a shot from in the game.

It was an absolute blast working on a big ol' fat guy in a game where everyone else was so built and in perfect shape. Gross was way fun, and a nice change of pace! More to come guys and more regularly haha!