Our aim was to create visuals that are open to interpretation and simple or geometrical in shape, so that sound would not be overruled. This proved to be one of the biggest challenges. Music and sound can trigger a lot of emotion and memories, but as an artist I have the urge to give the player a visual reference or context. Most importantly, I wanted to create a connection between players and something that was alive.
That’s why we also had ideas about adding a character that would guide you through the world and would act as a visual memory. In the end we weren’t able to use any characters in the game, because of technical and time constraints, so the life had to come from plants, surroundings, subtle movements and particles.
I started building color pallets, soft gradients, individual objects and environments in Illustrator.
Soon I needed to work in Unity as well to see how my colors would work in VR. I quickly found out that white and pastel tones and some saturated colors are not comfortable to look at or be in. Color matching is very different and it was clear that dark backgrounds work better than light ones in VR. I choose my colors very organically, so this was something new, since I had to adjust constantly.
The gradient tool (shader) in Unity also works differently than the one in Illustrator, the transition from one color to the next was way more instant and I had less control over it. Luckily fog adds a lot of depth and extra softness, shading and depth to your objects. We also wanted to maintain a 2D look in VR, which we achieved by creating simple 3D models and no shading. Niki Smit (Monobanda Play) created the models for the cell trees.
The moment we created a storyboard and all the phases of the level I created some concepts for these stages.
We had many ideas for the first scene in Remembering. One idea was that you start in a monochrome environment with one growing flat shaded cell that would turn into a three dimensional cell with layers. We ended up however with a blurry scene which acts as a metaphor for the growth and development of your eyes.
~ Liselore Goedhart