Among the concepts we worked on for the game, the idea of having an exploration game with no villans or 'bad guys' was key to our inspiration in the art work and concepts. We wanted to come up with fantastic scenarios where the player would have to explore and learn on it's own.
The main character is Harold (provisional name) and he is an apprentice of doctor. While traveling he decides to take a detour and take a walk in the woods. While taking a walk around underneath the a legendary floating island (where many legends are formed around) he finds an unconscious girl laying in the floor. He tries to help her but he's unable to determine how. He carries her trying to find some help and he finds a cabin in the middle of the woods. An old lady lives there but she doesn't speak the same language. While, this lady takes care of the beautiful and mysterious girl, Harold decides to help her and go around the woods and find a cure for her disease.
Now the idea for this game shifted from being a whole village with different illness and having time gauges of each villagers indicating how much living time they had. At this point we were working with a programmer that told us it could be an ambitious idea for the time we had to develop.
Even when the plot became simpler, the idea and the mistery behind the girl's background still persist.
The title 'Vivus' comes from the latin word for life and it represents the point we want to focus on; encouraging the appreciation of life.
The cinematic was really difficult to finished. I had a massive storyboard and nearly no time to work on that many images. Probably it was the problem that I worked in a detailed way in some parts that I probably shouldn't have (Plus I quite struggle with the essay itself).
Here's the end result of the cinematic, at least you can get a gesture of the kind of artwork that I was aiming for :
