The following is the first draft of our protagonist Victoria Black’s character bible. Enjoy! ^_^
Motivations: Victoria Black is always motivated by two things – her own sense of justice, and self-preservation. After years of seeing the lower classes of Victorian England subjected to all kinds of ill treatment, she witnesses the Ripper’s indulgence in the worst kind of bourgeoise grotesquerie – namely the murder of her close friends and surrogate family – and has been pushed to her breaking point. She will protect and assist the unfortunates of the world first, and act to save her own skin as a kind of secondary instinct. Her sense of justice is bent towards those who are ill-favoured by fortune, resulting in a sort of morality of the have-nots a la Robin Hood.
Personality: A quiet woman with a bold nature, she acts in subtle ways until a situation forces more direct action. She will not often speak about what she is going to do – she would rather prefer to directly do it and worry about the consequences later. When forced to speak about something directly, she will often be a bit more blunt than others may be comfortable with.
Past: A daughter from a pious upper middle class family, Victoria never felt like she really fit in. Her younger sister Abigail married a clergyman at a young age and secured the family’s expectations just before their parents were killed in a shipwreck overseas. As Abigail became the default head of the family, arguments ranged wildly between the sisters. Victoria was too daring, too wild, too politically charged, and atheistic to boot. The more Abigail desperately tried to keep the family together, the more Victoria pushed away, until Victoria left the country estate to pursue a life and temporary love affair in London. When the sea captain she lived illicitly with died of consumption, Victoria was faced with a hard decision – to return home to a life she loathed (branded with shame by her sister) or to try and eke out a life in London. She chose the latter, which by gradual degrees led to an addiction with opium, and eventually prostitution.
The woman that led her down this road was Madame Ling – owner of an opium den and supplier to the once casual opiate users Victoria and her sea captain. When her captain died Victoria first sought employment in London as a governess for a wealthy family. This lasted for a reasonable amount of time, but the pay was low, and the family’s expectations high. When the mistress of the household saw how shabby Victoria’s garments had become, and how favorably Victoria spoke of democracy to her children, she threw Victoria out of the home without preamble. Victoria sank into a great depression, and ran up a considerable bill with Madame Ling. Finally – in debt and unable to find any sort of sustainable work, she let Madame Ling talk her into prostitution, and began to work in the den.
Victoria Black brought in a great deal of money to Madame Ling’s establishment. She was unusual – a clearly educated woman of moderate beauty who performed her sexual services with a certain degree of pride. Her personality immediately set her at odds with the other working girls, and to a certain degree with some of the more affluent clientele, whom she tended to disdain. Eventually she left Madame Ling’s and began to work the streets, intent on saving enough money to begin life anew in the democratic country she so admired, America.
Physical Description: Auburn-haired, angular. Beautiful like a Disney villainess. She is lithe but amply endowed, and somehow compelling. Unusual-looking is key here. She is 24 years old.
Profession: We start with her between professions – she’s just saved up enough to emigrate to America, where she hopes to start fresh – possibly in private education as a governess. However she’s just at the cusp of falling back into her old profession again (with the user’s direction). Although her customers may overwhelm her emotionally, and require her to dip into her opiates in order to handle the sexual act with a stranger, she feels a range of emotions for the men she services – from a kind of brazen camaraderie to a vague motherly affection. These men are often her fellow street-dwellers – citizens of the Twilight City. They may use her for a purely physical need, but philosophically they are her brethren, and she feels connected to them as well.
She’s quick to learn and can soon acquire pickpocketing skills, a conjurer’s set of tricks, and even a quick familiarity with explosives. She can make do and survive by quickly assessing a situation and trying to cleverly exploit it – i.e., if a crowd is gathered around a street proselytizer, she’ll more than likely be skimming the clientele from the back.
These images include some character designs, and one mood art piece portraying the protagonist. They were created using watercolors – specifically Sumi-E watercolor paints, which seem to have a remarkable texture and opacity when manipulating them.
A Watercolor Mood Art Piece
Underling One
Underling Two
Our Protagonist's Sidekick
Overall I think the second underling’s features have a slightly sliding quality that needs to be corrected, but the coloration of these models is spot on. Notice how loud the color palette is for the underlings in particular. These tones are actually quite typical of the Victorian era, which tended towards rich primaries that have almost a violently seedy quality to them at times. In truth I love these shades – saturated, almost gaudily so – they’re reflective of colors we saw in horror films by Hammer studios rather than those represented in modern-day features. Think of the sepia washes that we like to use to portray the Victorian period, or the desaturated pall that some filmmakers believe evokes the past. Bright colors – particularly reds and golds – can evoke a horror and unsettling mood all their own, as this game will hopefully prove at the end of its creation.
We successfully managed to make Gamebryo work with latest WWise (sound engine)
Four of our team members are over in Calabasas learning Emergent’s fabulous Gamebryo Lightspeed engine. The days are long, but definitely fascinating. This engine seems both like a lot of work and a lot of fun at the same time. Kudos to the instant iteration system – you can edit the game, and save or export the block file and *instantly* see the update to the game right away! I can’t wait to see what we’ll learn tomorrow. ^_^
Meet our protagonist: a prostitute in Victorian London about to come against one of the most infamous murderers in history. Recovering from a career of dubious import, and an opium addiction of similar repute, she’s both strong and wary – strained and yet innovative.
I sculpted this head to be used as an orthographic model for Alice. The photographs will be imported into Maya and used as references for the digital sculpting that will occur within. It’s rough, and there are some slight burs that occurred while baking the head (which was made with Sculpey – gotta love that stuff). Also, the jawline is somewhat uneven, which needs to be corrected. What’s best taken from the head is the expression of constant tension. This is a woman on the cusp of dramatic action – never neutral, she is always about to innovate and pursue plans that she must put into action on impulse.
Tired, weary, an underling of an unforgiving city – she’s ready to come to life.
Modeled our first building today. Lots of detailing left, as well as much thinking. The current poly count stands at 6000-odd faces… will have to think about how to keep the art interesting without bloating performance. Once we get a few alleyways into the engine we’ll have a better idea how well it can handle, and how much optimization we need to put into the meshes, how much detail to relegate over to texture and cheats…
I started with this image I found over on casebook.org, then threw it into Photoshop’s Vanishing Point mode in order to start making some spacial calculations.
I doubt its anywhere near exact, but I’m hoping it got me into the ballpark, and it seems to make sense for a building on the east side of London to be around 30′ wide and 55′ deep. I had to use the figures in the foreground to try and average out the measurements.
The model is still lacking some details, the windows, the doors, the railing up top and obviously texturing etc, but I think I’m gonna leave it as is for the time being and start working on some more building. At this point I think maybe 20-30 generic buildings should suffice, and then we can vary the mood about by perhaps planting different textures on them and scaling them around a bit.
Here’s the model so far….
-raza
Unable to sleep, I’ve been wandering the intertubes searching for interesting reading. Found some stuff I think we should all take a peek at, who knows where it might be useful…
- The FBI’s Jack the Ripper casefile. It contains some interesting behavior patterns for the JTR vics as well as suppositions about his MO. The whole article is an interesting read, very suppositional, but that’s probably unavoidable in a situation like this. Choice picks:
- Welcome to the Twilight City. There are a few articles here detailing Late Victorian London, with an emphasis on nightlife and night atmosphere and prostitution. Choice picks:
- casebook.org has a really excellent collection of articles about London streetlife, with emphasis on the impoverished east end and night-time. Choice picks:
“A gloomy place, the Twilight City was never pitch black: the lights from smaller shops, the glimmer of lamps on passing vehicles and glow from household windows meant the urban landscape was always lit to some degree*. Even in the miasma of a thick fog objects were discernable on the nocturnal streets of London. The ‘pea-souper’ is such a powerful image that it is repeated time and again in films, books and illustrations. Yet the most dangerous element of the fog was not from possible criminals hidden by its embrace, but rather from the industrial toxins within it: thousands died from its poisonous effect to the lungs.5 During the day it was fairly common for the fog to combined with industrial smog, creating a ‘day-darkness’. It was not uncommon then for the Twilight City to become a 24-hour feature of urban life.”
“The more professional and streetwise prostitutes, Walkowitz asserts, forged safety and support networks among themselves. They frequently worked in pairs, she writes, ‘to protect themselves from abusive men and to overpower and rob tipsy customers.’86 White concurs stating: ‘Some prostitutes lured their clients in to be robbed by their bully [pimp or boyfriend, or both]. Often this could occur in a hotel room after the man had fallen asleep. Or if on the streets, the prostitute could take the client into a dark alley where the bully would mug him or, if he put up a fight, beat him to a pulp and then steal any valuables.’”The more professional and streetwise prostitutes, Walkowitz asserts, forged safety and support networks among themselves. They frequently worked in pairs, she writes, ‘to protect themselves from abusive men and to overpower and rob tipsy customers.’86 White concurs stating: ‘Some prostitutes lured their clients in to be robbed by their bully [pimp or boyfriend, or both]. Often this could occur in a hotel room after the man had fallen asleep. Or if on the streets, the prostitute could take the client into a dark alley where the bully would mug him or, if he put up a fight, beat him to a pulp and then steal any valuables.’”
“See there in that doorway of a house without a glimmer of light about it. It looks to be a baby in long clothes laid on the floor of the passage, and seemingly exhausted with crying. Listen for a moment at this next house. There is a scuffle going on upon the staircase – all in the densest darkness – and before you have passed a dozen yards there is a rush down-stairs and an outsurging into the street with fighting and screaming, and an outpouring of such horrible blackguardism that it makes you shudder as you look at those curly-headed preternaturally sharp-witted children who leave their play to gather around the mêlée.”
“In Whitechapel Road, between the church and Mile-end Gate on this night everything is to be bought from the stalls which line the roadway, especially on the left-hand side going towards the Gate from the City. Amidst the flaming naphtha lights can be discerned toys, hatchets, crockery, carpets, oil-cloth, meat, fish, greens, second-hand boots, furniture, artificial flowers, &c. Round every stall are eager women, bartering with the salesmen. It is evident that the poor mother must husband her farthings. The meat must be bought, and so must those boots for her young son; his old ones are so worn that they cannot keep out the wet any longer. Here are women chaffering in good-humoured content because their husbands have been able to give them a shilling or two extra this week; others with difficulty restraining the tears which are welling to their eyes because the price of meat at the stalls is so high that the dear little ones at home will no be able to taste any again this week.”
I’ve really only scratched the surface here. The sites are filled with a great richness of detail that will surely be helpful as we move forward in creating this world in the most visceral manner possible. If you’ve got some time to spare would recommend you browse over to there and read a bit.
I’ve also managed to find some good reference books among there, and have put out library requests for them.
-raza
I found some good resources to get us started.
Wikipedia’s map of the JTR murders help localize the areas we need to focus on for lower class London, but the street names don’t seem to match up with what was true for the time… probably they superimposed geographical location over a map that is out of sync chronologically. For example, the first murder, Mary Ann Nichols, according to Wikipedia takes place at a location call Buck’s Row, but the map shows it’s future name of Durward street…
BUT….
Our very own department of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health has an 1859 map up, sliced into quarter mile chunks, and I was able to
pinpoint this location on there… Heavy score… Buck’s Row, it’s just off the bottom left corner in the slice on the right. This map has great detail, and includes a lot of landmarks and building names that I think will really help us get the geography detail stellar.
I’m dropping an email to Prof. Ralph Frerichs, who headed the project for putting this map online to see if we can get access to the original digital map, uncut, so we can lay it in as a floorplan in Maya.
Good start, methinx.
-raza
