Hello there, community!
Let's talk mobs, shall we?
We have been working on more creatures that will inhabit Semisus and help bring life to it during your daily adventures in our world. Right now we are looking into aquatic creatures, and we are super excited to share their creative process and gather your feedback as well, so don't forget to share with us what you think and what other creatures you'd like to see in Profane.
Meet the Red Manatee, an aggressive medium-sized mammal that you will find in the sea and rocky beaches of Semisus.
They are herbivore creatures that spend most of their time in the water, where they are most agile, despite their size. They live in big colonies of their kind and are also very territorial, meaning that if you decide to go mess with them, expect to deal with at least a few since they will alert others nearby.
A male Red Manatee is much bigger than a female. Still, they can all defend their territory by aggressively inflating their chests and throwing themselves onto the opponent or prey. Due to their size and monstrous weight, they can even split houses in two.
Some believe they can be domesticated and used as guards if you put a lot of effort into it, but they end up fleeing if there aren't other domesticated Red Manatees around.
To create what you see so far, we had 2 game designers (Victor Turatti and Nina Bichara) and one artist (Mateus Lins) work together to develop the mob's behavior, lore, and looks. Their reference was, obviously, a manatee and the challenge was to add the Profane twist to it, so it looked like it belonged in Semisus.
Mateus had a lot of fun creating the visual design because the initial draft itself is loaded with traces that carry a lot of personality to play with, mainly because of the inflatable chest and the dorky wrinkled face. Manatees accumulate algae on their backs, so there was also room to mess with that and create that tough and scarred back you see since it's a violent and territorial creature that needs to have signs of previous fights. Our artist seemed to have a blast during its creation since there were no significant challenges, and he had a lot of material and freedom to work with the Red Manatee, and the result turned out amazing!
Initially, the Red Manatee was designed to inhabit beaches only. Still, since we also want to have the seas filled with many creatures, our game designers suggested that the design hint that it could live in both. It was already established that it would inflate its chest to attack, so that's where they started working from. While Nina thought about the creature's environment, lore, and valuables that could be harvested from it, Turatti developed its combat aspects. Which reminds me: remember, none of this is final yet! You may see changes to our dear Red Manatee before meeting it on Alpha, alright? 🙂
All of this is discussed between the three of them, so Mateus has a lot of information to work with: from its skeleton and movements to other visual details that help tell the story.
It is also important to notice the concepts of possible variations of a Red Manatee. They might be from different islands or biomes that have evolved differently to adapt. This is not confirmed yet, but we are happy with the variants our team came up with.
Which one is your favorite? What other creature do you expect to see?
