DS2 Walkthrough / Soundtrack

Ah, YouTube -- comin' through with the playlists!

~No-commentary walkthrough by Hassan Alhajry
~Gorgeous soundtrack by Jesper Kyd
(Favorite track : 05 "The Corruption.")

Mirrored Constructs

Why I advocate traditional sketching : The majority of these were done in a restaurant that serves hot wings.

These bbq-stained half-golems where then scanned, flipped, made into darken layers, then nudged back and forth horizontally until Constructs appeared.













When you work blind, you occasionally wind up with stuff your brain might not otherwise attempt.

Construct Turns

If you ever have to do a turn of someone else's frontal silhouettes, I highly recommend 3/4 views with a slight topdown, like these...  



When you DON'T do the slight topdown, they suddenly look lame.  Hope you're taking notes!

Constructicons

Before we knew what Constructs were supposed to be, we knew what they weren't supposed to be : robots. This first round saw to that!

Shout-Out

If you haven't checked out the other non-Joe-Mad concept artists who set the look and feel for Darksiders II, here's a sampling :

Nick Southam (aka 'Alpha')
Han Randhawa [no site available]
Phu Giang [no site available]
Johnathan Kirtz
Rayph Beisner
Avery Coleman
Dan Beaulieu

There may have been other contributors after I left (awesome outsourcers, etc.), but these guys were the heavy conjurers.  We were all doing our best to follow in Joe's footsteps, of course, but each of us had something kinda special going on.  A flavorful broth, to be sure!

Construct Codpieces

The Construct Hulk took many steps to reach completion, certainly more than I assisted with.  The most I had to go on initially were those stacked, floating rib-y things.  People liked those.



Head exploration...the head was going to detach at one point and be a different thing, a "Sentinel."  It was going to float over static stone chunks and reanimate them into smaller Constructs.



There also needed to be a dark, "Corrupted" version of it, so I suggested some bolt-on armor plates.



The Corruption bolt-ons I liked best were on this page.



Later, the Corruption would become this thick, black goop stuck to him.  All those extra armor chunks would have taken too much time to make, and they wanted to apply the same effect to other Constructs.



Would you believe I iterated on codpieces for him?  There was an accompanying page showing what they all looked like dangling from his junk-region.  By that point, the design-by-committee had started to become a little ridiculous.



...leading us to an in-the-ballpark modelsheet.  This arm here, that head there, this dick-armor on his dick...  When designs get Frankensteined, they lose unity, often becoming busy.  In the game, you'll notice a bunch more stuff was added for gameplay's sake : crystal sockets in his shoulders and head, climbing planks on his legs and a big, fuck-off hammer.



Process gripes aside, he was salvaged by Vigil's awesome animation, sound and VFX departments. Whoever said making games was straightforward?

Brom Watch!

Time out to give props to one of dark fantasy's originators, Brom, who was painting skulls, spikes and straps before it was cool!  I recently had the chance to attend a workshop with him and Iain McCaig.  Needless to say, we were all pretty starstruck.

Hurly Burly Constructs

In addition to the rinky-dinky Constructs that you fight at eye level, and the roly poly Constructs that you use as a lava-segway, we also needed a giant one to climb and jam enchanted crystals in.  Here's round 1 of that.



This one I must have felt confident about modelsheeting...



...and head variant-ing.  (Because people are picky about heads.)



We'll get to the one that got approved in the next post!

Roly Poly Constructs

Crumbled Maker stonework + spooky magic = Constructs.  That was the big idea, anyway.  There would be all sorts, but we needed one that Death could ride on.



#6 was the one deemed worthy of exploration, so I broke it down further.



Then they were, like, "Put a ball on 'im."



Upper left tweak came directly from Joe, and I did the turn.  In the end, I don't think this guy was very successful.  1) He's not placed among the Maker architecture he's built from. Rather, he's down in dungeons.  2) Whoever modeled the standalone squiggle-sphere wasn't aware of this fact, so it's visually jarring next to, well, everything.  3) The ball rolling mechanic just isn't something Death looks cool doing.  But hey -- you win some, you lose some.

Cute, Cuddly Constructs : A Little From Column A...

This week we'll take a break from dungeons and spend some time with the Constructs, the broken bits of Maker architecture that come to life and hit you with stuff.

This page riffed off some of Joe's drawings, but introduced a few new body and weapon types.  The Powers That Be must have really liked the broken pillar weapon (A), because that wound up in the game.  Look, mom, I'm helping!  

Random Dungeon : Door World

Christian Lichter, art director on the original Darksiders (and current art director on some obscure game called 'Diablo'), used to call me "God of Doors." This was back when God of War was still big to-do, so it was much funnier.

Random Dungeon : This 'n' That

Before there were Constructs, there were thumbnails.  I did a whole mess of Construct stuff, but the first of it appeared here, in these dungeon drawings.