Behind the Design

The Project

This project was both a long road to getting done and something that just hit me after seeing that there was going to be a gamejam based on content from 1927. I wasn't familiar with specific things of that year other then metropolis, but after digging around and finding out all the things that were created that year I quickly started putting something together in my mind. 

 The first thing to capture my imagination being the painting  of the Automat by Edward Hopper.  It's such a beautiful painting that captures such a stark loneliness that I originally wanted to just simply recreate it in 3d but then I stumbled upon the knowledge that there was a publication of Dracula that was produced for theater at that time. It was at this point that may brain started running with the idea of meeting a man late at night at the automat and him turning out to be Dracula.  I started looking for a copy of Dracula The Vampire Play in Three Acts online and it was surprisingly difficult. Even google only had a short selection of pages. However I was able to find a reprint from my local library and what luck, no holds were on it!

Was able to find a reprint(1960)  of the 1927 version of Dracula at my local library.

Once I was able to get my hands on a copy of Dracula it was go time! I read the whole thing in a night and started planning my month. The red of the cover would become the cornerstone of all the designs for this game. 

I started off with the idea that I'd be making this game in 3D with Unity but after 2 weeks of going through tutorials I realized there was no way I was going to get this game done in time. So I put the 3D project on hold with the full intention to go back to it.  I had originally intended on designing a whole different character as Lucy Seward but with those 2 weeks lost I resorted to using the woman in Edward Hopper's painting as the protagonist for this game. This was perfect as I didn't have much time left in order to draw both characters expressions as well as animate Dracula's teleportation ability.  So with time freed up I went to work creating Dracula. 

The Cast

As I mentioned before the red of the cover became Dracula's most important design motif. I wanted it to be a highlight of his design and so I tried to use as little of the red in the interior scenes as possible. I wanted Dracula to be cold and rather lifeless while Lucy expressed a wide range of emotions and energy. 

Dracula was difficult to nail done as most designs for him are either much older  (Bram Stoker's Dracula 1992), or kind of greasy (Van Helsing 2003) I wanted him to be someone who was approachable, with a bit of mystery but also someone who had an aura of strength. So I turned to Dracula Untold (2014) and Castlevania (2017) to come up with a version of Dracula who could be both a friend or a foe depending on the version of Lucy one wanted to play. I tried to tie in his description from the play, he dresses well but is starting to get up in years with these other depictions of him.

The Location

The Interior was the easiest of the backgrounds to come together in form as I for the most part simply traced Edward Hopper's painting and then colored it in myself. I tweaked the colors a bit to give the space a bit more sense of place as well as added some tables and chairs that aren't seen in the original painting. For the lights out shot I rebalanced the background with a red to show that Dracula is now the center of this scene.

The exterior was much tricker to put together as it required a lot more references to figure out exactly what I was going to do for it. I was reminded of other Edward Hopper paintings and their lack of glass in their windows but didn't like that effect for the exterior shot. I didn't want folks to be ablet to see in as it made Lucy appear too much as she could be wandering the streets with eyes on her. I wanted her to feel alone in the spaces she occupied so I decided to make the glass too bright to see through. I took the initial colors from Nighthawks but ended up tweaking them to balance with a saturated red that could be found on the original Dracula cover and in Vlad III's family portrait.

Behind The Creator

I am bisexual and polyamorous and I wanted to make a game in which characters existed that might have had the struggles that I have had in my life being who I am. One of the characteristics behind Dracula as a character is his three wives. Something that I thought I could add some grounding to. This is also possibly the one aspect of this game that I wish I had more time to define. Perhaps as I take on this game's themes again in Unity and attempt to build it into a larger solid game that may get fixed. For now I'm simply happy that I got the game done.

Thank you for taking the time to even look at this work! It means a lot!