 Ahoy, hoy. Today I have decided to sit down with Vess, the art director, I believe I'm getting your title correct, for Northwood Studios, the game studio behind SCP Secret Laboratory. I was contacted recently for the purpose of talking a little bit about the SCP-173 redesign, which is something I know that you are quite interested in learning about. So, Vess, introduce yourself and anything that I either got wrong or maybe didn't cover completely. Who are you and what do you do? Hi, I'm Vess. I like to make monsters. For that purpose, I joined Northwood Studios to redesign the the SCPs to make them more visually appealing and emotionally invocative for the player base. And I know I listed off at least one of your titles, but you have other titles as well, right? I do have other titles. I'm currently acting liaison for the audio department as well as the I am acting lead for level design. Also, I do perform game design and document writing for the design department. And you wanted to talk today about the SCP-173 redesign. So, we'll just start with the most basic of question. Why does SCP-173 need to be redesigned? The reasons vary in their significance and their emotional needs. For instance, number one, the original sculpture by the artist from Japan is his own work and the image originally was taken without his permission. That being said, he has provided permission as long as his work is not being used for financial gain. So, in the interest of possibly funding our game in the future through any means at all outside of donations, we need to make sure that we are not crossing that threshold. Absolutely. Are there plans for that right now or is that just a for instance? This is us future preparing. We don't currently have any paid portion of our game. We do plan to add potentially cosmetics and decorative things, but no gameplay factors will be financed by, yeah, no pay to win. Right. And I have a, let's see, is the tripod looking one, I believe that was your final iteration, right? Yeah, the tripod looking one, which we've lovingly named Matthew, is the final iteration. All right. Can we talk a little bit about your design philosophy, what you were attempting to accomplish with this? Well, it goes back to, I've got a couple of thumbnail sheets here, which are me trying to find out what, at least within the studio, people emotionally respond to with 173. I explored things such as tribal themes, like uncanny valley hyper expressions of human traits such as a large eyeball or even a mouth, maybe tried to do contorted children's mascots and whatnot. In fact, for the April Fools, we turned one of my more extreme examples into the April Fools, Mr. Nutty, which is a very large peanut with some brown slacks and a very creepy grin reminiscent of a particular web meme. However, I tragically wasn't thinking of it when I made it at the time. But yeah, so the point was to explore the psychological reaction that people have to sculptures and statues, like what makes Chuck E. Cheese statues so unnerving to look at or have look at them. And so, yeah, I focused on exaggerating all those traits, a few candidates in another thumbnail sheet where I decided to push them to at least a little bit of shading. People were very, very attached to this sort of four dot cross shape as the face for peanut, which is really funny because the original sculpture actually doesn't have those paint lines on it. It was a containment breach that with their version of peanut, they put that particular draw pattern on it, which is actually completely off from the original sculpture. It would be fair to say that containment breach sort of has shaped public perception of 173 in a very serious way because it's the only or at least the first real instance where you could interact with SCP 173. Right. And even though there's much to criticize about the, that game's general detail level, what it did successfully with peanut or 173 was that it proved to us that they can change 173 and it can keep the creep factor. The fact that it's not exactly accurate to the photo is a testament that what we're doing isn't impossible. It's just difficult. We have to invoke everybody's emotional memory of what 173 is. And that's my ultimate goal was that I wanted people to see it. And their first reaction should be, I don't like looking at this thing, but not in a grotesque sort of way, but it unnerves me. I want it to also be familiar in a way where they can recognize, oh, it is 173. Right. Because one thing that's very important about 173 is it has rules. And so you want people to instantly recognize it. So if I went with sort of like the Aztec statue, which I explored as one concept, that although very evocative is not recognizable as 173, because it's missing all of the different tropes. And even the one I did, the pseudo tribal tattoos one, the baby one with the painted cheeks, this one, although, you know, prominent in working the baby reminiscence thing that people like about 173 did not work because it missed some of its iconic like the iconography of the way the face was done. Right. You talked in the pre-interview a little bit about some of the like the design philosophy for you has been that you at least treat the lore, the background lore, as though the various SCPs have something of a covenant or an agreement, and there are rules that have to be followed. And you, you were talking a little bit about that yesterday. I'd like you to expand on that just a little bit here. Okay, not going too much into game design, but the way I feel like we have to do an adaptation of these characters from a written and very ambiguous and like Lovecraftian sort of fiction into a traditionally more grounded mechanical one of a video game is we have to understand the rules at which they play. For instance, 173 has, to me, a very, a very childlike innocence to it. One could possibly evoked by its very fetal proportions, but also due to its behavior. 173 wants to be seen, and it punishes those it feels aren't neglecting it. And when there's no one around, it throws a tantrum. It leaves poop blood all over the walls, all over the floor. This thing is a needy, needy child, a very innocent thing, and it lashes out, it grabs people, it breaks their neck. And I don't feel like those are meticulous, or I don't feel like those are like pre, well, it's funny. I don't think it's actually planning to do it. I think it likes to be seen. And when it's not seen, it is so hurt, it cannot emotionally contain its rage, and it hurts those around it, which makes it more complex. How has that translated into the actual design that you've been working on? It is a conflict, a psychological conflict in 173 that I've recognized. And part of that, I've decided to manifest in its many different faces. It has multiple faces protruding from all sides. This thing can see in all directions. And what that is, the show, it's conflicted nature. It wants to be seen. It wants to see everything. It's sort of lost in that way. And that's also another thing that I went into with 173's design is I wanted to invoke emotionally what an abstract artist like the original artist would do, although I focused less on wood carving and more on sculpturing and how to express emotionally. I focused very detailed on the eyes. I made it so it's different heads are in angles that express different emotions, whether it's looking down with a tilt to be more saddened, whether it's looking up hopefully pleading for help, whether one's just glaring at someone who's betrayed it. Every one of these faces evokes a different emotional page from this stagnant object. And that's what I felt was necessary and why it had to have the multiple faces is because I feel like he's an emotionally complex character, but he's set in stone. He cannot move. So he needed to be multi expressive at one time. And so that was the catalyst behind his many faces, including one that's very hard to find. By the way, if you guys ever get the chance to look at it in game, look at the top of it, and you'll see a very small, very sheltered, very, um, I would say protected face. And when creating content around SCP wiki content, one of the biggest struggles I've seen, especially from offsite creators, game creators and etc. is this sort of tug of war between what we consider the offsite fans and the onsite say writers and more will say snooty elites, for lack of a better way to describe them. How have you approached that tug of war? Is there a side that you're particularly more interested in pleasing? Or is it both? Is there a strategy you have for trying to find a solution, for example, in your redesign that pleases both sides? Oh, absolutely. My methodology is to trick certain members of that community into interviews and then let them have a piece of my mind on a public platform. No, uh, basically, for the most part, I recognize that the creative studio, the writers and such are themselves a an internally, um, organic structure. They are each one trying to create on their own principles and values. And so when it comes to approaching a very creative cycle like that, it's it's it's classic art class to me that when somebody's when the teacher sets up a still life and everybody's looking at that still life from different directions, every drawing is a little bit different, but yet the banana is still in the frame. That doesn't mean that everybody agrees on the shape of the banana or, you know, it's actual meaning when people try to invoke emotional responses of the still life. It's simply everyone's internal take of it. And that's more of the like everybody's internal take of the foundation in general, the entire site as a culmination is an emotional entity that each of us defines on our own perspective. So when I when it comes to addressing the preconceived notions of everyone, I know it's absolutely impossible. There are too many ways people think about it. So what I need to do is I need to get to the core. I need to find the center of that still life, find the banana and remind people that that's what's important. Again, with 173, it was about finding things that you look at it and it's like, oh, that's 173, because it needed to be reminiscent. So things such as it's general color, the color palette of the different paints used, as well as as far as like something that's kind of an underwritten topic of 173 is the way he leaves fecal trails behind himself. I've actually gone to great lengths to make sure that we can successfully recreate that in game. With, you know, with moderation, we want to make sure we test that and make sure people aren't overly disgusted by the thought of it leaving trails everywhere. That is a interesting thought actually to have that the statue might do that. Out of like a sense of curiosity here, because I personally haven't played a lot of secret laboratory I played it once or twice on my channel. But I am curious, is this redesign current? Is this something that you're putting in now? Is this something that will be going in later? This content is not currently released as we are going through all of our current SCPs and redesigning them gameplay wise as well as visually in order to bring them up to a more modern standard of player interaction. The timeline for that is like currently we have a delay with the release of 096's rework and we are working quickly to get to the back end issues that are causing the delay so we can get back to testing and get that content out. The implementation of 173 will be much faster than 096 and as long as we don't have any surprises we can get that out in a very soon trademark period of time. Right, out of curiosity since you brought it up but you don't have to go into nearly as much detail on it. What other SCPs are you thinking about redesigning besides 096 and 173? 096 is actually my baby by the way. The very reason I joined the team was to replace the current 096 model. It inspired me to great emotional fervor to redesign that model. We actually intend to replace all currently playable SCPs with a notable and odd exception to 079 as replacing the computer model is not necessarily a rework of the character itself. Every SCP is currently in the process of being redesigned mechanically as well as visually. I have a particular interest in 939 when we get to that point in development. Again this is very much down the road but I feel like there's a lot of psychological and emotional aspects of 939 that are very cleverly written into the subtext of its article that all of the video game interpretations have been less enthusiastic to expose and so that's one of the things I want to look into. Well I think that covers just about everything you wanted to talk about. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you wanted to make sure and communicate? Uh let me think here. I believe I believe we've covered everything. Well excellent it was very nice talking to you Vess and I'm looking forward to these changes on the SCP secret laboratory. I haven't played it a lot but I have played it a little and I plan on playing it in the future. In fact today's upload was going to be me playing secret laboratory just to take a look around and see what they have going on and maybe I wasn't sure if I was going to play that or the unity containment breach but then you contacted me and we decided to do this instead. Excellent. It was great it was great talking to you and yeah let me know if you have any other things you want to talk to the community about. I'm always available as a potential avenue for that. Thank you very much. Excellent I'll do. Thank you very much for watching. 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