Poor Neighborhood: where campaigns take form

Hi there, friends and foes of democracy,

How are you all doing?

Socratic Democracy is a game that explores the theory of democratic decay as proposed by Socrates and Plato. The game available here at itch io is just a prototype, but I am working on a much improved version, with more scenarios to explore and characters to interact. In this devlog, I will delve into the poor neighborhood, a key scenario.

On the importance of the poor neighborhood scenario

In Socratic Democracy, players strive to be popular. They must win elections every year. To accomplish this, they engage in a continuous political campaign, meeting people of all social classes, hearing their concerns, showing empathy, making promises, bartering favors. While the game will provide several venues and scenes to perform this campaign, the poor neighborhood scenario is "where it's at".

There, Leonidas (player's character) will meet representatives of the common people. Three of them are lumpenproletariat types: a homeless, a drunk, a criminal. Others are from the working class, either artisans - a ceramist and a smith - or workers of the service industries - a barman, a prostitute, a harpist, a cartman, and Euterpes, the city's playwright. 

Together, these characters represent the majority of the voters. Listening to their concerns will therefore be key to figure out a winning strategy: which oligarch should be expropriated; whether to start a war or not; whether to invest in parties, theater plays or education...

Designing the poor neighborhood scenario

When I was designing the game, I initially thought that Leonidas could interact with the common people in a bar. The main advantage of this idea was to make them all fit a small space. And it helped that, according to Socrates, common folk living in a democracy would love to  get drunk. 

The problem with this idea is that it was a bad user interface. How could the player know that the person drinking wine on the upper left corner is a smith?  I would need descriptive tags, and that is not fun.

I eventually decided to present the people in their "natural setting", by drawing a slice of a neighborhood where these characters could be found. I would then use architecture and other elements to convey what their professions (and personalities) are. The poor neighborhood would act as a user interface, an in-world menu of characters to interact with.

I believe this is a good idea, but it makes the art super hard. And to make matters worse, the artists hired to make scenarios have left the project months ago, so it was up to me to make this scene.

I do like hard challenges, and I felt that making this scenario would be a good way to test (and improve) my art skills. So, when my vacations began on early June, I decided to work the hardest I could to make this art as well and as fast as possible.

I began by checking the city view and selecting which part of the image would make the best setting for the poor neighborhood. In the city image, shown below, each layer corresponds to a social class, with the poor neighborhood consisting of the largest and lowest level plateau of the mountain. I eventually selected a small segment where one could see parts of the theater as well as the temple in the acropolis. Can you identify which part I selected?

Next, I modeled the scene in Blender. This was necessary, as my previous experience drawing the Agora taught me that perspective can be hell. As a plus, Blender allows me to use a fish eye camera, which helps make more objects visible. 

Making the model below took me 5 days, working full time.

The Blender model made it pretty easy to get the contour lines figured out. However, I noticed I had to make several adjustments to the mountain and even some foreground objects for aesthetic reasons. This took me one day, although, to be sincere, I have had to make changes afterwards.

After getting the lines straight, the hardest part began: adding colors, textures, shadows, effects. I noticed I work in cycles: I need to have a first color on everything to only then start working more seriously on each individual element. After detailing, say, a third of the image, I start to visualize where the entire scene is going. I then make adjustments to the colors before proceeding. It is a mysterious process, I never know what my next step will be. I can't believe impressionist painters could do all of this in a few hours.

One of the difficulties I find is to balance the style between realistic and cartoonish, while preserving the coherence with my other scenarios. I am sure I am failing in many ways, but I also feel like I am succeeding in making the image interesting.

The work also requires researching materials and construction processes of that time (ancient Greece, circa 370 BC). I try to stay close to reality, but I take a feel poetic liberties here and there. I know poor houses in ancient Greece where made predominantly of sand  and soil, but I felt I could create a more convincing art style by making them predominantly made of rock. I tried to make it clear that they had a primitive type of cement, which is realistic.

After 7 days working full time on the colors (and a total of 14 days for the entire project), I got the image below.

(Please notice that the characters are there just as reference, as they have not yet been designed).

Next steps

The work is not really done. However, I feel like this is close enough to share and get to know what you, friends and foes of democracy, think about it. Do you agree that lights and shadows must be adjusted? Which elements would you add to make it more evident that this is a poor neighborhood? Is the wooden house a blatant incongruence with ancient Greek architecture? 

I feel like this is good enough to add to a prototype of the game. So this is what I will start working now.

Cheers,

Pedro