Building Midnight Evil
Last time I presented overview of the game and my view on the story that you will find in Midnight Evil. This time I wanted to share my thoughts about two other important elements of this game, Urklings and Otori
Midnight Evil Urklings
The Urkling’s in Midnight Evil are a combination of Troll dolls mixed with goblins and other nefarious creatures of the night. Designing them was very interesting. I really wanted them to be believable, with a well-structured back story on how they came to exist, and what drives them.
I also wanted them to be something that could appear to be playful but also rip your face off. There are three known tribes of Urkling, each with their own traits. The red ones are energetic and move fast. The green ones are fat and slow. The white ones are fast and masters of deception.
The sound design for the Urklings was an adventure all by itself! I handled the majority of their standard noises; however, their screams are a combination of wild animals, mostly the honey badger! I drew inspiration for this from the sound masters of Jurassic Park.
There is also a fine line when creating horror, between showing the spooky elements too much and not enough. This is something that I have struggled with in the past and took a page right out of the movie Jaws for this. The less is more mentality as far as scaring the audience. Originally the Urklings were going to be much more visible, running around your bedroom, and I decided that was far too much screen time for them and they would lose their potency far too quickly.
Midnight Evil Otori
The in-game virtual console in Midnight Evil, the Otori was something that I greatly enjoyed created. It started as a joke. When I was set-dressing the bedroom, I decided I wanted to fill it with some tongue in cheek humor by way of the fake, gag posters on the wall.
One of these posters I decided to make for a believable game console of the time period. Since this game takes place in the early-mid 1980’s I wanted to give some kind of shout out to Atari.
Atari being one of my first gaming experiences as a kid, I really liked the idea of the Otori and during development I animated a small loading screen for it. After I did this, I decided that this was way too good and I ended up building out the entire in-game console with games and applications inside of it.
I handled all of the pixel artwork for the console as well, and that was really fun for me, and a breath of fresh air, since I’m normally just programming and don’t get to draw.
Nate Sanders Creator of Midnight Evil
