Reign of the scavengers is a beautiful exploration of a complicated, fascinating and sometimes brutal ecology. Nest is also a beautiful exploration of a complicated, fascinating and sometimes brutal ecology. Their approaches and styles are different, but the underlying themes share a connection and an artist. caleb wood is an animator and now game developer who worked as a concept artist on Max's sci-fi show while also solo developing his recently released arcade game Bullet Hell.
Having started his career in animation 15 years ago, Wood decided he wanted to discover game development in 2020. Nest It was intended to be something simple that you could use to teach yourself how to program. “But since I can produce pretty good artistic quality,” he says, “I felt like I had to at least try marketing and see what I could achieve.”
In Nest, players simultaneously control a flower and a wasp in a symbiotic relationship, while fighting all manner of insects and bugs in their broader ecosystem. Wood draws parallels with symbiosis in The reign of the scavenger, where dozens of strange alien creatures live in tenuous and dangerous harmony. At times, the humans who land there also discover how to coexist with the nature around them, with varying degrees of success.
But he calls these parallels “autonomous”; He says that he deliberately didn't plan much about them as he worked on each project. “I definitely gravitate toward natural themes and that kind of thing,” he says. “(But) the only thoughts that go through my head (for Nest) were that I want to use these creatures and insects and even the background as a canvas for the looping animation.”
Much of Wood's professional experience focuses on creating these looping animations. Nest specifically draws a lineage from some of his previous short films, such as the one from 2015. TOTEM. Here, the animations are built from intricate details, becoming more complex over time, and it's easy to see this as another example of both the natural themes and fluid, repetitive style present in Nest.
During development, these types of animations became increasingly influential in the game as a whole. Woods began creating “loop weaves” in specific areas, such as insect shells. “It was a way of putting more and more information into a small piece of animation,” he says. And as these animations became more and more detailed, he began to realize that overwhelming the player's attention would eventually become part of the game's difficulty.
“Because the game was slowly becoming about splitting up players' attention spans, I just decided, 'Okay, what if I leaned into that and made everything absolutely overwhelming and hard to watch?' ”Wood says. Combined with the neon colors and the simultaneous control of two characters, Nest It's frenetic. (Perhaps more frenetic than anticipated: Wood says he may not make design decisions like twin controls again, calling it “not very accessible.”)
On the contrary, Reign of the scavengers It has a much simpler art style. “It's like you're playing with geometric shapes every time you design,” Wood says of his work on creature designs. It was “refreshing,” she says, to alternate between the two projects.
Both television animation and games felt similar in the sense that they were trying to create solutions to constraints. In scavengers, Wood would receive requests from the show's co-creator and art director, Charles Huettner, to fulfill a certain narrative function. In Nest, the art would have to fit the game. “Every time I worked on creature designs for the show, my mind would clear to get back to the mess of Nest”says Wood, and vice versa to return to the reduced designs of Scavengers reign.
He also says that working as a team to scavengers It meant things were easier for him personally. “You just focus on your small part that will serve a bigger purpose,” he says. Working alone and making a design decision also meant dealing with all the knock-on effects. Changing an enemy's weak point, for example, is not just about editing the art, but also everything further down the domino line: code, game design, etc. “This gets out of control very quickly,” Wood says.
Wood isn't sure exactly what's next, but he'd like to continue creating games, as a team, if possible. although he says Nest was helpful in having a full understanding of the different parts of game development, he says it would be “amazing” to get a dedicated programmer. But whatever his next project is, given his current work, it's fair to say there's a good chance it will involve strange creatures and the ways they coexist.
