Designing Wednesdays - Part 3
In the previous parts of this newsletter, we discussed how to talk about child sexual abuse through video game and how a theme park management game could help to do so. But there is something important we still haven’t talked about. Something the sharpest eyes might already have noticed.
Take a look at this key art:
Do you see it?
No?
Look closer:
Do you see it now?
Fine, I’ll tell you:
The main character’s head is actually a cube!
And if you look even closer you’ll notice he’s not the only one - some other characters also have a cube for a head!
Part 3 : The Cube(s)
These cube heads appeared quite early in the project. You could already see them back in October 2022 in Exaheva’s first sketches (Exaheva is Wednesdays’ main artist, read our previous newsletter to find out more about the team).
As well as in January 2023, when I commissioned Sylvia Zhang to draw the first concept art for the game to pitch the game to various publishers.
Sylvia Zhang drew a series of “cubeheads” back in 2019 for an inktober (a self-imposed challenge where you have to draw something with ink every day of October). And while this is not where I got the idea of cube heads, this is definitely why I trusted Sylvia with this concept art. By the way, go check her amazing work!
So… why cube heads ?
Design-wise, there were a few reasons to go in that direction:
1) I’m a big comics fan, and if you are too, you probably have heard of this outstanding comic essay about comics themselves: Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud.
In the second chapter of this book, McCloud explains that the less detailed a character's face is drawn, the easier it becomes for readers to identify with it.. I’m not sure I’m allowed to use except from McCloud’s book, so here’s a homemade demonstration (you’re welcome):
By making some characters’ faces totally blank, I kinda hoped to induce this self-identification by the reader. Did I put the slider too far? Well you’ll tell me.
2) Wednesdays’ “memories” are 100% hand drawn by Exaheva. I’ll go into more details about this process in a future newsletter but what you need to know is that every character pose, every change of expression is a new drawing. A character smiles? A drawing. A character frowns? A drawing. A character sulks? A drawing. That’s actually a lot of work! By making some characters (and especially the main character) expressionless, the number of drawings required for each scene would be considerably reduced, right?
…Right?
Well that was the initial plan anyway. But it kinda backfired, and hard! Because what if you actually want to show expressivity from a faceless character? Well, you have to do it through body language, and that’s much more work than drawing a simple face!
3) This should come as no surprise: Timothée’s character is loosely based on me (we wear the same shirts!). I don’t think I’m less of a narcissist than anyone else, but I certainly wouldn’t have borne spending 3 years on the game while looking at my own face. And someone else’s face might just have felt wrong. No face: no problem!
4) They might not look like it, but cube heads can actually express stuff. Not all cubes look alike: there are transparent cubes, cracked cubes, scribbled cubes… and each of them conveys its own meaning.
I’m not big on metaphors, I’m not a poet, and I tried to keep most of Wednesdays deeply rooted in realism. But these cubes are the fraction of the game where I chose to let it go and allow abstraction to do some work for me.
Of course, none of these reasons is the main reason. That one resides in the story itself, and will be up to you to figure out.
So don’t forget to share/subscribe to the newsletter blah blah (this line was supposed to be a placeholder but I’m choosing to keep it at the last minute because I find it funny. However, since I’m afraid some people might take this for laziness or carelessness I’m now feeling obliged to explain the joke, which kinda ruins it. Oh well.)