In today’s very special edition of ‘Concept Art Corner’, Anime 3D SFX’s Thibaud de Souza not only reveals a second batch of beautiful conceptual artwork for Project Spectral, but also sheds more light on its compelling plot and game-setting, talks us through the new pictures and, perhaps best of all, describes what we can expect gameplay-wise from this upcoming manga-inspired survival horror title.
As you no doubt gathered the last time I posted about it, Project Spectral is easily one of my most eagerly awaited iOS games of the year (due in no small part to how much I loved this indie studio’s weird and wonderful debut Antistar), and these fascinating new images and snippets of information have only served to further heighten my anticipation! Anyhow, enough about me — without further ado, I’ll hand you over to Mr. de Souza:
The story
Our story takes places in an alternative future, on an island to the east of Japan known as “The Sun’s Cradle” or just “Cradle Island”.
Cradle Island harbors a deserted city created around 2025 by a rich entrepreneur. The project was abandoned a few years later following a string of unexplained incidents.
Silence and mysteries shrouding the failure of the “Sun City Project” gave rise to an urban legend involving “shadow dwellers”; observers lend little or no credence to this, noting that such rumors awkwardly mimic old tales whispered by fishermen on the mainland.
With Project Spectral what we’re looking at is the case of Kagami, high school student, dead in November 2035. In spring 2036, Kagami was spotted in a railway station and we are led to believe that she is the only passenger on a train bound to Sun City.
About the gameplay
I guess you could classify Spectral as “survival horror”; the game uses multiple viewpoints and exploration takes a significant part. I created a navigation system designed to make 3D accessible to more players without putting them on a rail.
While gameplay will mainly require timing and reflexes, there is a strong element of stealth/tactical gameplay as the player need to evade collaborative AIs combining super-natural powers (e.g telekinesis) with realistic sensory models.
About the pics and the ‘Spectral Team’
With this game I set up a very open process allowing guest artists to contribute work to the project. For many of them, “Spectral” is a first experience. I won’t mention everybody today as we have more than 10 collaborators around 7 countries or such.
Kagami’s diary is an experimental collaboration between a very young Mangaka, Olivia van Gorden (US), and Zhang Chan (China) who already signed cover art for Antistar.
From early on we had a partnership with a Beijing studio creating 3D content, Bihishijia Media; they contributed a fair bit to the creation of the Kagami character. We swap models and designs around a lot and I got a very dynamic newbie on our team, Török Zsolt (Hungaria), who just finalized the Inter Island Commute for us starting from one of their designs and is giving a lot of momentum to 3D production.
Once again, our heartiest thanks goes to Thibaud for sending along the pics and indeed taking the time out of his undoubtedly busy schedule to pen the illuminating accompanying text. If you want to find out even more about Project Spectral, I thoroughly recommend visiting DeviantArt, Anime 3D SFX’s official site and OOgtech.org.