Wednesday, October 11, 2006

The Carnival DePrave


Nothing beats a worn out, deserted carnival for sheer atmosphere and spooky good times. The level artists did a great job creating Kosmo's base of operations, the Carnival DePrave. This was the final location in Voodoo Vince. Once the level designer John Baron finished laying out the platforms holes and the structures, Doug Williams created these superb black and white mood pieces. The level artist (also John Baron, come to think of it) worked from these to create the final level art.


Hmmm... In retrospect, the entryway to the carnival has a somewhat goatse-y look to it. Shame on anybody else who thinks that.

Every level in a game like Voodo Vince is a big accomplishment, but each one is filled with reminders of things that might have been. The Carnival DePrave was, if anything, a bit too empty and deserted. I had hoped to fill the booths on the midway with playable minigames. But our ship date was looming. The mini-games ended up as static pieces of background art, but you can still see the original idea thanks to the textures in the level. John Baron thought up most of the games while doing the initial level design.

The final in-game textures were given a wonderful air of festive decay by Dan Cole. You can almost smell that bilge water taffy.

I can only imagine what sort of bent mischief these might have turned into. All you super elite Ton of Clay readers will notice that Madam Charmaine's original name makes a slightly modified appearance. All of these images incorporate bits and pieces of walls we photographed in and around New Orleans.

CK

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice post once again. Yesturday i found out this website: http://home.f01.itscom.net/spiral/t_rando/t_rando1.html
which shows an abandonned theme park. Kinda freaky on some pics.

Clayton Kauzlaric said...

Excellent pictures!

Peter said...

Doug and Dan think they're sooo great.

It's true!

Jeannette said...

Have you ever considered making a Voodoo Vince point-and-click adventure game for the PC? We have a PC in almost every room in the house but no console system, and we miss the old adventure games (Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max). We used to play them as a whole family, clustered around a 15" monitor and giving advice to the mouse jockey. Now we have a 32" monitor in our den, and nothing worth playing on it.

Clayton Kauzlaric said...

I love the old school adventure games, and I can certainly see Vince being right at home in that sort of world.

Anything with Vince would need to be cleared by MS since they now own the IP. The other challenge is finding a publisher who is still willing to take a risk on something like that. Some developers/publishers have been able to find an audience for smaller adventure games, but on a pretty small scale so far.

One thing I've always wanted to do with Vince is a seriously old style sidescroller.