Psygnosisverse

Will it blend?

I decided to look into the Psygnosis Amiga games. They had a certain visual style, which can probably be attributed to the cover artwork by Roger Dean and Richard Clifton-Dey, and the inhouse artists of Psygnosis course. Needless to say, I ended up drawing some studies and creations of my own, eventually coming up with a new project - combining several Psygnosis games into a... "mega game".

Unusual format this time. I usually correct a lot of stuff digitally (my eyes skew things quite a bit, leaning // ), but I've kept these all analog, for the charm of it. There might be some blatant nudity below. It just happened. Paper: A4, Pencil: 0.5 HB mechanical. 99 PPI.

In order of appearance:

First, I just drifted with the wind, checking out whatever game or cover art I came across. Then tried to learn the visual language and come up with a similar one of my own, a sort of amalgam. Initially my doodles just looked like a jumble of disharmonious blobs, but once I was familiar with the vocabulary and noticed the commonalities I went back armed with the eraser and made things rhyme a little better.

I think it might be possible to integrate all the different fun shapes into the same environment/setting if one's aware of the transitions which needs to be made. Hmm. Nemesis the Warlock might fit right into a... Deanscape. Tangent. I reworked the "Ork" character a bit. Some stray girls wandered into the frame, no doubt looking for the famous hot springs rumored to exist on this haunted planet. Anyways, it's interesting to let abstract shapes dominate. I usually don't place them as high on the hierarchy.

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Ah! There's the hot spring. And GODS was Bitmap Brothers. Bitmap Brothers did amazing pixel art. Also, they had this warm-cool gradient style which defined a lot of the Amiga games due to the limited palette.

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Figuring out the tile system and playing around with the vocabulary. The Roger Dean style is very much about coherence of direction and negative spaces on a larger scale. Small tiles don't play well with their neighbours so some massive tiles would be needed, and/or a clever tiling system. I haven't thought much about the game yet. Parallax works poorly in gritty caves (due to haphazard conjunctions and tangents forming), so I'd only use it for the surface running (or along the travel direction in the case of Metroidness).

Started jotting down some design notes here. Hmm, I always draw torsos too short/squat.

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

More Psygnosis games, Obliterator, Menace, and Brataccas. And Super Real Mahjong P3 and Valis. Yeah, derailed for a bit and looked into the Valis games. Oh my. I don't think I've seen a franchise raped quite so literally. NSFW, in case you go down the same path.

Also, I saw this strange kind of duck mech helmet in a Star Wars trailer on Gametrailers.com. Made me want to steal the idea for it. Then I woke up, scribbled it down at the bottom. Not as good as in the dream, but it might still be usable for something.

Psygnosis Valis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Mostly straightforward studies this time, mainly from Shadow of the Beast and Ork. Sadly, there are no good dumps of the Amiga gfx for these games. A lot of the enemies are morphologically similar so I came up with the idea of some lateral gene transfer / mutation convergence thing going on. And I discovered that Lionheart had been using a language similar to the one that I "developed" (with the balls and tentacles). Studies in disguise at the top left. Couldn't leave that space blank. Yeah, I actually draw from bottom right, reverse read order, or diagonal up.

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Story illustrations lay scattered about.

Maletoth, the biggest bad guy, is... a large african man with a potato nose? Perhaps he can be tweaked, a bit.

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Surprise!

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Totally a counterbalance to all the naked girls, right? So, trying to make things out of the more abstract SotB bosses and pieces, stitching a Frankenstein's monster together. Also played a little Baal. Very nice feel to the movement of the character with bobbing of the massive gun, but combat and maze mechanics were too cheap. And now we know who throws those barrels.

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Shadow of the Terrorpod Empire Agent? This is a rather busy mockup. My idea is that the surface of an entire planet was hit by a terrible weapon which threw the surface into chaos and turned it into a kind of metal fossil. Life was later reintroduced. This explains some of the surreal designs, and creatures trapped in walls.

And more exploration. Needless to say, the combat system in SotB is rather lacking in depth. The lack of "contact" hit feedback is also dissatisfactory. Started looking at fighting games, but I think in SotB the hero is more of a powerhouse who just has to brute force punch stuff until he finds a nice weapon. Noticed that he doesn't put the opposite leg forward when punching. Still no clue if the girls are relevant. Witches looking for their horned god?

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Momentum lost, it seems. Couldn't finish the sheet. Had some ideas about which enemies are related species. *The slime creatures could morph into different things like jaws, sliders and maybe slinkys.

Psygnosis pencil drawings and concepts by Niklas Jansson

Story development

While I'm not intimately familiar with the lore of the various Psygnosis games, I have skimmed the background stories of the games I thought were the most compatible and interesting. I've been watching Let's Plays too, but there's probably quite a bit of in-game information (dialog, intermissions and graphical clues) which I have missed. I decided to write down some key points to get a foundation for the super-setting.

The Killing Game Show

the Killing Game Show

Ork

Ork

Ork Ork

Shadow of the Beast

Shadow of the Beast Shadow of the Beast

There are three SotB games, but I haven't looked much at the sequels. The first game has a different atmosphere with the strange monsters. The sequels are more puzzle oriented and feel less... beastly.

What about...

Menace, Brataccas, Obliterator, Terrorpods, Baal, Blood Money, Agony, Cytrons, Awesome, Leander, Lemmings? I have yet to look deeper into the story of these games to see if they are compatible.

Menace doesn't reveal who the protagonists are (afaik), but their ships look alien, so that conflict could've taken place anywhere and anytime it seems.

Blood Money takes place after Venus has been colonized and interstellar travel is possible, and mankind appears to be in a silly gamey mood, so perhaps it's contemporary to tKGS. The "2121 season" is mentioned.

The Terrorpods manual mentions an evil Empire which is occupying an asteroid with unique resources... resources which are used to manufacture giant Tripods of immense power. The tripod design came from an unused War of the Worlds painting by Dean.

Baal takes place in 1999 and is about a "the devil" trying to take over the Earth. The devil might have been around since the 12th century. Also, mankind is reaching for the stars at this time, and the devil knows this.

In Obliterator, some alien races have banded together to destroy the mighty Federation (humans). They send a powerful warship, which destroys the Federation fleet. In a last-ditch effort, a genetically enhanced soldier is sent to infiltrate and destroy the warship from the inside. Its crew is a hodgepodge of different aliens and robots.

Cytron is about robots in a research station running amok.

Psygnosis logo Lemmings

This drawing is older, but it belongs here, maybe. Killing Game Show meets Walker.

Killing Game Show Walker

Merged setting

Long ago, the Ixians, a powerful and genetically advanced race finally lost a long lasting interstellar war against the mysterious Gorgons. The last stand of the Ixians could hardly be described as a final battle, because no shots were fired. The Gorgons had unleashed some strange force even beyond the understanding of the Ixians. The entire surface of Ixion, along with its inhabitants was somehow metallized in mere moments.

After just narrowly escaping the metallization of its home world Ixion, an Ixian survivor crashed on Earth. The wounded being, halfway fused with its damaged seed ship, sunk helplessly into the ocean. With the onboard genetic material and ship databanks damaged, the lone Ixian had one last hope to rebuild the Ixian race and civilization. It sent a blood carrier drone to the surrounding islands, hoping that it would be able to use the local life forms rebuild a functional genome set. Years passed, and the beaches filled up with the warped bones of the blood carrier's victims. It seemed like none of the native species responded well to lateral gene transfer, or like the blood carrier drone had too little to work with.

ZIGOR story by Niklas Jansson

With no other recourse, the Ixian activated a distress beacon went into hibernation halt the genetic degradation. If another another Ixian seed ship was out there, even a damaged one, perhaps a complete genetic set could be reconstructed.

However, unbeknownst to the sleeping Ixian, one of its spawns had survived the genetic onslaught, but became a terrible monstrosity - a Beast known as Maletoth. It would infect those around it with its uniquely mutated Ixian blood. The Beast was eventually defeated in some quarrel, but the fate of the lone Ixian remains unknown.

Centuries later, the Heyadahl (a race of therapsid-like bipedal aliens) would stumble upon the dead Ixian homeworld and use it as a training ground to harden their military personnel. A wide array of hostile obstacles (robots, life forms, traps) were introduced into the unusual and haunting domains. Decades later, a lost trainee came upon a protected blood repository of some sort, and recklessly opened it.

ZIGOR story by Niklas Jansson

While the Heyadahls proved strangely immune to the effects of the blood, the aggressive Ixian genes soon infected most of the introduced life forms on Ixion. Nowadays, Ixion is populated by a fauna of strange creatures, some with an uncanny likeness to the frozen forms of the long dead Ixians...

Not all of Ixion serve as a controlled training ground for the Heyadahl. In some regions archeological expeditions are trying to unveil the mysteries of the Ixians, and a possible genetic link to the Heyadahl. Also, with the fleets of the Gorgons once again looming on the galactic horizon, any information that the Ixians might have held on the Gorgon threat could be of vital importance. After the blood was found, hopes were raised that other artefacts may have survived.

Despite an embargo imposed by the Heyadahl military, Ixion does see a notable amount of unauthorized visits, more so now when much of the Heyadahl fleet is positioned elsewhere to respond to the Gorgon threat. Usually, a lot of the trespassers are young Heyadahl hotheads who were unfit for military service for one reason or another. Then there's the recent alien incursions. Some are just fortune seekers, whilst others have been sent by powerful criminal organizations, or their own governments.

Unfortunately for the Heyadahl, someone else found a still functioning Ixian data core, and they're not looking to share their find. When they were detected, they set up defenses and barricaded themselves in, hoping to eventually teleport out.

Will the Heyadahl be able to retrieve the data core and use its secret in the war against the Gorgons who are threatening the entire sector? It's clear that whomever stole the data core plan to use it for their own gain, but what's the intent of the other trespassers? Can they be trusted?

Justifications

The Ixian stranded on Earth is a homage to Cthulhu and Pathways into Darkness. Ork and SotB both have similar terrain and creatures, and a traveling infectious Ixian (Vampire+Alien?) could be used to explain this. Blood potions are mentioned in SotB (and also Blood Money for some reason), so perhaps the lateral gene transfer works that way. It could simple be hinted at rather than be explained like... midichlorians.

Turning Ixion into metal solves two things. Ork is rather monotone, suggesting that everything is made out of (or coated with) the same rusted material (gray and brown), and the terrain isn't destructible so it's presumably quite tough.

The surface of Ixion could have thin layers of vegetation (destructible?), allowing for some SotB parallax runs. The trees and rock formations are horrible twisted shapes of metal, sometimes with Ixians and large bubbles of molten metal embedded inside. The finer organic detail like leaves and grass was probably vaporized, explaining why the metallized trees don't have leaves.

The monotony of the warped terrain could get a bit dull, so I decided to mix in the Killing Game Show with it's recognizable dual gradient chrome style. This way the shiny new robots of the Heyadahls (perhaps HALFs imported from tKGS?) can separate visually from the terrain. Some of the organic creatures might be more camouflaged though (as they are in Ork).

Perhaps Ixion was under siege by other alien empires at the time (or they had a zoo), explaining some of the frozen oddities found in the terrain. I drew a giant crab-worm from Menace on one of the sheets. Also, the Heyadahl's probably modified some of the terrain to make their training grounds more challenging, because it's unlikely that the Ixians themselves built obstacle courses and puzzle sections as seen in Ork.

A few, rare Ixian artifacts escaped metallization through some fluke (self sustaining force fields?), and finding these powerful artifacts could be one of the goals of the game.

Characters

What kind of characters (protagonists or NPCs) might be encountered on Ixion?

Tentative timeline

Since a lot of the games doesn't mention all that many dates or external events (and sometimes not even race), I was able to piece this timeline together.

Extra

Some related mockups on these pages: Palette page, Amiga page.

Beast

Naked beast is more raw - it doesn't make concessions by dressing up in fantasy fashion. Just out there kicking arse. I did want to suggest that it had been chained at one time though. Maybe one leg had to be repaired at some point?

Terrain

Some loose doodles. I should look into Leander more. It has some fun wall bosses.


Art by Arne Niklas Jansson

AndroidArts.com

The Psygnosis stuff is now owned by SONY, afaik.