Cuttletrunk Master Sheet
Key Visual Features:
- Melee\Ranged Creature
- Classic Progression\Power (5 tiers)
- Elemental Progression
- Exotic Progression
Cuttletrunk General Description:
The Cuttletrunk is a heavy flying ranged attack creature zipping around using his agility to get into prime attack positions. Like an octopus - his skin on the face mimics the terrain to create geometric shapes. From his face, projectiles can be fired. They are more likely found on middle and high threat worlds. They can be alone, or in small or medium sized groups. When idle they rest on a “dock” on the surface. When agitated they leave their dock and shoot projectiles at enemies while strafing around their target. His main attack is a pull and push beam in which can push a player off a cliff or drag them over a lava lake as examples. Some variants pick up enemies before flying straight up and dropping them, while others rip blocks from the ground and fire them. As well as drops from the creature itself the dock has some drops too.
Art Direction and Style
The creatures of Boundless epitomise the geometry of the voxels of the world by means of their sculpted chunky sharp angles of their mesh as a strong definition of art style.
Like in reality, creatures on earth often blend with their terrain for use of camouflage - our creatures also belong to the terrain to which they inhabit.
Development in animation/rigging/skinning up to the final ai, where providing a ‘soul’ to the entity (no matter what it is) is ultimately the fundamental goal, is also carefully considered. Those all additionally harmonise and overall becomes relevant too as a hositic creative package which adds greatly to their personality conveyed, the world they belong to and ultimately the quality we as a team all aspire to reach in Boundless.
The Cuttletrunk in particular takes this ethos to heart… like an octopus - his skin on his face mimics the terrain by changing as part of his rigging to create different geometric shapes in animation. The changes in key poses between circle, triangle, star and square face shapes therefore become a major part of his identity.
- This conveys a ‘personality’ behind each attack or action in combat visibly exhibiting when he’s feeling aggressive or passive.
The Voxel Blocks of the Boundless Universe and Creature Tinting
In actuallity our creatures go even further than that…
A core part of our design is that the areas of flesh and armour availiable for tinting will hopefully take on properties of colours directly from the voxel blocks on the Biomes that they belong to!
The idea, is that you will have creatures like a Road Runner belonging to a Desert Biome taking his colour palette directly from the Sandstones it’s intrinsic too.
Perhaps also, the specular parts on the Hopper or Spitter also take properties from the Gleam found in Caves?
In any case, this will need to be carefully created and managed by the art team because the only way we’ll tell if this will work (the way we hope it will), will actually be when we create the assets and try it out in game.
The last thing you’ll want is creatures that disappear visually in that environment unless that is the intent.
- For the Road Runner who is Flamboyant - perhaps a complimentary part of the colour wheel is best suited?
We will know more as we develop this exciting feature which directly links the creatures to the actual sandbox world of Boundless!
