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Blight, a Lucen?

5 years ago1,028 words

This is a follow-up to ∞ the post from yesterday ∞, where I talked about the characters in my new game, Belief. A couple of comments inspired me to take the main character in a different direction, which led to redesigning his race. I'm not sure of the details yet though, despite lots of brainstorming!

As I explained in the previous post, the main character is called Blight, and he's of a race that used to be called the Mhandisi, and which used to look essentially like dark-skinned African humans. He's the only one of this race in his immediate environment, and that was largely responsible for his negative feelings about himself and negative treatment by others... which apparently was too close to the discomfort of real-world racism, and I definitely don't want to upset anyone!

Also, Blight tries to see his name as meaning "Bringer of Light", and another commenter mentioned that that's essentially the translation of Lucifer, the name of the devil.

Those two things led to what I feel is a more interesting design direction! Since Blight's role in the game is essentially that of Jesus, trying to convince others to believe in a new god who'll save the world, him having a demonic appearance, like Lucifer, seemed intriguingly ironic!

I've been wanting to do something different with this race for a while, rather than them just being the same as the human-like Bold but with a different skin colour. That's quite dull. So here's my current conception of them:



They're called the Lucen, and they're a particularly ancient and intelligent race... or they were, before their genetic information was harvested by the Aolmna for Alora Fane, at which point they started off from essentially the same place as the other five races since their culture wasn't retained.

In the millennia since then, they've (re-)developed advanced technology, which is interwoven with the spiritual attitude encouraged by the Aolmna. Their petal, which they call The Enlightened Technopolis, is an endless shining city, dominated by helpful robots and grand churches.

Anatomically, they're so similar to the Bold and the Meek that they likely had a hand in their original development, before the races were integrated into Alora Fane. All three races experience attraction for one another and are capable of producing offspring together.

They have two large horns, which serve as ears. They're largely hollow, and they convert vibrations into meaningful sensory information. Lucen hearing's quite acute because of these.

They also have a gem-like 'third eye' in their forehead, which has some relation to their ability to intuitively 'perceive' spiritual aspects of reality that other races are blind to.

I'm still trying to decide on their colour scheme!

In a nutshell, they're 'nerdy spiritual demons'.



Blight naturally would have these horns, but they were removed when he was little because Bold don't have them, so they were assumed to be a deformity to be cured. Chopping them off massively impaired his hearing, though it didn't render him completely deaf. Still, his hearing issues made his feelings of alienation even worse. As he got older, his racial creative instincts led him to invent 'headphones' which improve his hearing. Since the Bronze Archipelago doesn't have advanced technology, he had to make do with large snail shells, which are similar enough to the actual organs that they do work, to a degree (I've always liked ammonites, so maybe a version of those lives in the Bronze Archipelago?).

I think this gives him a cuter look (he reminds me of a koala!), which is quirky and which shows off his inventiveness. Plus Lacuna also tried to cut off her ears, but he succeeded where she didn't, so that's another contrast between their similarities. He'd also likely meet others of his race eventually, who might even be able to use their technology to give him the 'halo' he was always meant to have...



Deciding on a colour scheme is proving challenging because so many things seem like they could work! I like quite a few of these many often-subtly-different variations for different reasons. I like the idea that purple skin would suggest outer 'darkness' while yellow eyes reveal inner light, but I feel I've already used purple for the Varnyn and Sindrels... Red looks nicely demonic and isn't used by another race, hmm... The coloured markings around the eyes are part of the race's natural colouration rather than tattoos specific to this character like originally planned. They look sort of like glasses, to give the subtle impression of intelligence or even nerdiness. I'm not sure of the colour though; I wanted to use a strong accent colour that's different to his outfit and skin, and I like purple, but as I said, purple's already used by the varnyn and sindrels, so maybe green could work, especially since this is the creation race, but I'm not sure about how that looks...

Something I learned while studying evolutionary psychology at university was that we likely have large white areas (sclera) in our eyes (unlike most species) because they're social signals. From how much white is showing in the eye and where, you can tell where a person is looking, even from a huge distance away. Since expressions will be used heavily in this game, it makes sense that the main character should have eyes with colours that we can 'read' easily in this sense (dark pupil, lighter sclera), unlike the black sclera and gold pupil in some of the earlier concepts. Perhaps the rings around the eyes could have had some evolutionary benefit too, for example making it look like their eyes are always open to ward away predators? That'd mean they'd need to be yellow, like the eyes, perhaps even with dark spots on the eyelids... HMM.

I'll settle on something eventually!

I find it interesting posting about this stuff, so hopefully at least a couple of people find it interesting to see this development process rather than just the end results! It'll be interesting to see how much the final design resembles these early concepts.