Ever since the creation of the world that would come to be known as Luna Abyss, there has always been a clear vision. Bonsai Collective Art Director Harry Corr and Creative Director Benni Hill left with a bag of influences and a set of aesthetic and narrative cues that underpinned the early world-building. This vision is an integral part of the game we have created.
Caption: Tsutomu Nihei’s fault! had a major influence on our art style and level design
Building the world of Luna Abyss was a process of extrapolation – building outward from carefully defined core concepts, expressed in early level blockers and key narrative beats, a core of characters to bring these rhythms. Any good construction needs a solid base; ours was a sprawling brutalist megastructure, a sky within a moon, weird enough to pique the imagination. How did we get here? Or East here? These are the questions our protagonist asks, and who better to answer them than an omnipresent disembodied head…?
Caption: Beyond the decaying corridors of Sorrow’s Canyon lies a vast alien landscape that Fawkes can navigate.
So how do you take something as vast as an alien moon and scale it down enough to understand where your characters are and how best to tell their story?
“We started with the cell,” says Lenny Ilett, a character designer at Bonsai Collective. “The game revolves around the axis of the cell, so it was quite important to define these characters In the cell so that we have something to work from. For our main characters – protagonist Fawkes and their prison guard Aylin – the cell is the site of their most important interactions. It’s also a space of transition, literally and narratively – Fawkes returns here between missions to rest and process the events of the day. It was a useful reference point to build the relationship between these two characters – how would they react to each other in this place of forced proximity to the outside, where their roles are more clearly defined?
Caption: Ellie: Elevator attendant, train conductor, poet.
For the most part, building our characters was a back-and-forth process between the art team and the narrative team. Fawkes and Aylin were cast early in the process as the key characters in the story, but over time, and as the world grew, it became necessary to expand our cast in order to tell the story. that we wanted. Here, art and history have worked hand in hand. An example of this is Urien Caldecott, dubbed “axe cat” by the internet, who existed in concept for a while before he was given the character design treatment. Lenny describes the process of viewing a character as chipping away at a block of marble, revealing the character in increments based on their dialogue or backstory. “You bring words to life on a page,” Lenny says of Urien, “but what does that look like? It’s something you have to navigate.
Legend: The mysterious Waif is the first person you will meet in the Abyss, but not the last.
This process also exists in parallel. Some of our NPCs started life as basic character models; biomechanical guardians, much like the one Fawkes inhabits, who come in a variety of weird and wonderful forms. Lenny explains that these guardians emerged from a process of continuous iteration; back and forth between character design and animation, ensuring that the designs were truly achievable in three dimensions. For this, designers have often drawn inspiration from the natural world. Lenny gives the example of a particular guardian who originally had human-like legs, but ended up with a structure more like a kangaroo, to better maintain balance. Similarly, animator Marie Trystad mentions the way the snakes move in order to animate Aylin’s oddly long neck. This in turn inspired the sound design; one particular character the player will encounter in the Meadows is a glorious amalgamation of ideas from across the team, brought to life by Marie and given an even stronger personality by Sound Designer Sarah Sherlock. In this way, our characters have truly been a team effort.
Legend: Environmental storytelling allows us to shed more light on the world of the Abyss.
Part of the process of making our NPCs feel like living, breathing people who inhabit a vast, inhabited world, beyond the limits of Fawkes’ scope and perception, was bridging the conceptual gap between machine and the human soul within. It was important to us to give these characters their own self-contained stories, which intersect with those of Fawkes, but still give a sense of a world beyond the one the player directly experiences. By assigning models to these characters, we then found ourselves in a situation where it seemed necessary to understand Why they were into those particular gatekeepers – what traits could cause a person to be assigned one type over another, and what that meant for the characters. It is from this central question that we ourselves began to better understand the world we had created. The results of this can be seen through the additional lore encountered in the gaming world.
Caption: Our artistic team took on the challenge of representing the human soul trapped in the machine.
As these characters began to earn a living, it seemed important to make them visually distinctive – not just on a practical level, so they could be differentiated from the multitude of other Guardians across the Abyss, but also because it seemed reasonable. that these individuals, with their own personalities and identities, would seek to individualize their own appearance in some way. This was the most important point of collaboration between the story and art teams. I had an ongoing dialogue with animators Waseem Shaheed and Marie Trystad, exchanging questions and stories to better understand who these characters were and, by extension, how they might move; this in turn influenced the personalities of these characters, which became more clearly defined in the way they held themselves or the intricacies of their movement. Likewise, I worked with Lenny and art director Harry Corr to develop visual shortcuts, within our limits, to express elements of personality through appearance; assuming that these characters, by virtue of being trapped inside biomechanical bodies, would find ways to customize them to their liking.
We had always intended to create a cast of characters with diverse identities. Our protagonist, Fawkes, is non-binary; we have chosen to present this simply as a fact about them, without posing it as a question to be discussed or a dilemma to be pondered. We chose to include a variety of ethnicities, sexualities and gender identities among our cast to reflect the lived reality of those in the studio; it was important to us to normalize all of these things and weave them into the fabric of the world, which also included casting voice actors to authentically portray these characters. From a visual perspective, we took on the challenge of how to signal certain elements of these identities in a realistic way, given the limitation of non-human guardian bodies. In other cases, we decided to play with the cognitive dissonance of – for example – two cisgender male characters housed in female-coded bodies. In the end, we let the characters themselves guide our hand.
Finally, we have also created a library of lore entries, which the player discovers as they progress through the game. Collecting them will create a codex of entries, which will act as an archive rather than a comprehensive encyclopedia; letter, journal entries, and other windows into life on Luna, adding context to the events Fawkes experienced. The end result, we hope, will be a glimpse into a world that came crashing down two hundred years before Fawkes set foot on the blood moon.
