Backstage: Generalist Visual Development

Introduction

Greetings Spacefarers, and welcome back to another backstage post, written by yours truly, neoNote! As the title suggests, this post will discuss our visual development and history with the mean bean automaton businesspeople throughout the galaxy, more specifically, the Generalists!

Generalists were publicly introduced in Horizon Talks 4 in September 2023. The lower equivalent of Specialists, these distinct Cogs have their own sets of abilities and business flair. Although quite powerful, they are tailored for random encounters on Infini-Suite Floors, Cog Building Floors, and other non-unique locations and serve a unique role in shaking things up for an otherwise normal battle!

The first instance of these Generalists was made back in October 2022. Since then, the original concept has gone through quite a few passes of gameplay design, rules, and tinkering to bring them to how everyone knows the bosses as they are today! This post will detail all the different concepts and conundrums we had to go through to finalize every design!

Design Process

Now, the first question you may be asking is “How does the EVH team design cogs?” To summarize the overall process:

• Our design process consists of allowing anyone on the team to pitch their concept/idea for a cog’s design in a certain period.
• Next, we have a voting process to see whose cog design should stay as the main basis, which takes about a day to vote for.
• Once the voting period ends, the design with the most votes wins, and is chosen as the base for the design.
• Team members talk and give ideas about how the design can be changed and altered until we have a design that everyone is happy with!

We want to make sure that every team member who pitches their design is heard just as equally as others. The final product is always made from collaboration and deep consideration from multiple departments, and we like to build a common vision for every idea that makes it on the board!

Now, let’s get onto those Generalists!

Pitchman

One of the very first special cogs, and technically the first Generalist of them all! Before Generalists were established, Pitchman had a much simpler visual design. In contrast, his gameplay design was rather complex, as expected of a Specialist. Much work was done in order to keep him at bat with the game’s evolving systems and art styles. After a first iteration of modelling and texturing, we put him into the dev build to test how he looked in our world next to other cogs.

The goal with designing Pitchman was to incorporate a variety of baseball themes.

• His face resembles a pitcher’s glove mitt, allowing for room on the inside while sticking with a solid and theme-fitting material.
• Like any Cog who values their own safety, he wears a batter’s helmet.
• Finally, the microphone was added to tie into the idea of telling someone all about a sales pitch. He knows how to speak his mind.

Fun fact: The idea for Pitchman was made on a whim in a casual meeting while I was researching business terms for my own original characters. The team loved him so much that he was quickly adapted for an in-game appearance!

At the time, our range of enemies other than the original 32 Cogs, 8 Astrobots and 4 bosses was limited to OverCogs and Specialists. Knowing how big of a role Pitchman was shaping up to fill, we gave him a few more attributes to let him show stronger emotion and draw out that tough mean aura of a strong Cog.

• We decided to give him a mouthguard to add some structure to his jawline. Some could also interpret it as a wide toothy grin!
• We settled in favor of giving him only one eye, as well as changing his face structure to appear more menacing.

  

Blamestormer

After Pitchman, we browsed through business terms once again, brainstorming bunches of boiling hot ideas for new business brutes. And what do you know — an idea, indeed, stormed right in.

Personally, Blamestormer was one of my favourite concepts to make, partially for how cool the name was. For the first time, we employed a new strategy within the concept art department: every member was free to pitch their own design, from which we voted on a base and additional details to sculpt an agreed design. In this instance, Khoi’s design was voted to be used as the primary basis for Blamestormer.

• The hat he wears in his final design is an ushanka, a cultural staple of Russian fashion. Khoi had pitched the ushanka Blamestormer wears as an alternative for a top hat, given that a top hat would fly away more easily in high winds.
• Blamestormer’s hair and beard were designed to further portray the wind element into his design, appearing very flow-y and cloud-like.
• A weather vane was also attached to the top of the head as a fun visual gag. At one point, it almost became a part of his fight mechanics in which the vane could point in different directions! However, it was decided against in favour of more visually distinct mechanics.

From Khoi

• He’s an interesting character since I took a long time to think about his term and how he would make sense as a lawbot. Eventually I settled on him being a cold, distant lawyer who loves his status more than anything. It felt only right for a man who thought highly of himself to be someone who’d deflect blame so readily. From there, I played more with the idea of him being someone who looks down on someone.

• I wanted his fancy, well-groomed beard and gold accents to invoke a sense of opulence, along with referencing celebrity lawyers and how flashy they dress. The hat was made to flow down into the face, with the beard pushed outward to make it seem like he’d howl his accusations. The accents and beard were also made to obscure his face as a means to make reading his face harder. From there, Neo took the concept and reintroduced his lovely goggles and fine-tuned everything, including adding in that lovely shade of teal!

Greenwasher

Greenwasher’s final design was originally going to be different compared to the one seen today. However, getting to the final design seen today was a rollercoaster and a half. Based on the character artists had in mind for the term Greenwasher, we focused on a balancing act: show the right amount of outward cheeriness, while implying an intimidating aura of deception and seriousness.

The original final design was modelled after a front loader washing machine, which was made by CyberByte. We ultimately decided that this design was a bit too silly for a threatening type of Cog, so we had to play around with alternate designs a bit more until we landed on something that worked for everyone.

• The head is based on a top-load washing machine. They are commonly known to be an inefficient type of washing machine, with the eyes and nose made to look like rotary dials. Funnily enough, the addition of the top loader design wasn’t done intentionally, but worked even better to his design.
• Greenwasher is, in my opinion, one of the more emotive cogs out of the five current generalists. This was intentional to be able to have the model’s emotion swap from cheeriness to intimidating in a clear way.

  

Bondholder

When it came to Bondholder, I honestly did not expect him to be the fandom’s favourite, from all the amazing fanart I’ve seen of this guy (Seriously, y’all are incredible!) Bondholder only went through a few more concepts compared to Pitchman. However, I’m pleased to say that with what limited detail the term gave, we managed to make quite the captivating cog creation, thanks to Khoi once again!

• With Bondholder, the team overall wanted to make a design that fit the visual connotations of a certain secret agent, with the suave hair and dashing eyes.
• The camera shutter eyes were an addition to draw from old James Bond movies, as we really did want to lean into this design aspect.

From Khoi

• Bondholder was an interesting case. I have never watched a James Bond film, but I was really determined to try my hand at the prompt, since it was such an interesting title to me for a cog. I’m used to the idea of cogs embodying things like businesspeople who try and meet budgets by razor-thin margins, or those who push risky investments, but he was a first in terms of hearing about a cog who wanted to play it safe with his money.

• From there, it was a matter of pulling everything I could think of to make a very by-the-book design. Everything from his shined faux pomp to his fountain pen chin was added to make him seem classy, almost to a strangely safe standard. I did want him, however, to feel “off.” The end goal with him thus became to make him seem artificially charming.

• Bond’s smile eventually developed to one that I enjoyed when it didn’t reach his eyes. Considering the detail Retro had put into the concept of shutter eyes, I wanted the sole focus on him to be on those. Eye bags, shaded lids, and brows were all additions I made strong in order for the player’s focus to be drawn away from his face and towards that. From there, the swirl was just added to reference 007’s opening and to match his eyes. He was a fun one for sure!

One of Bondholder’s signature details is his camera shutter eyes, which are able to resize his “pupils” and drastically change their shape. This lets him express more emotion visually without delving too much into facial flexing. It took a while for this effect to be completed via rigging, but we eventually struck success after researching and studying similar methods. That’s quite the photo finish for a deep dive into technical art, I’d say!

Change Agent

And finally, Change Agent, the most emotionally endearing employee of them all! Change Agent was nowhere near a tough challenge compared to Greenwasher, but she certainly had a journey of her own. It took a while to settle on a design we liked, having a few concepts that related to money and double faces.

However one of our artists, Pandy, brought up the idea of Change Agent having three faces, depicting sadness, anger and happiness. Everyone got hooked on this immediately, and soon we went to refining.

• To relate to the “Agent” part of her name, we decided to add a wide-brim fedora, which ended up giving a more feminine look to the Change Agent.
• To fit with the Astrobot theme, her face is meant to mimic psuedo-constellations, using the dots and lines to add the eyes and mouths.

We believe that this design choice made her stand out a lot more as a character. Certainly made her into a favourite for people!

From Pandy

• When it came to making the initial concept, I was considering on make a chameleon cog at first due to how chameleons change their colors to camouflage with their environment. When it came down for drawing the concepts however, my brain had the sudden idea of going with a theater mask aesthetic, taking direct inspiration from Tragedy and Comedy masks. Their design was more based on the mechanics and personality of the cog rather than being a pun of the name as a result, being a cog who changes their expression and tone to best fit the role they need to play in a specific scenario.

• The colors used for the original sketch were meant to be placeholders and not the final color palette since I prefer to sketch with colors rather than black and white but the team liked the combo enough for it to stay in the final, a surprising lil’ accident I suppose that turned out perfect in the end.

From CyberByte

• My main idea with the change agent was working with Shapes. Because after all, why stick to one head base when you can really put the Change in Change Agent by working with the three basic shapes! So I did just that! You can see what inspirations I took below.

• Fitting them under the hat was the biggest challenge, mostly for the Angry face due to the lil’ faux demon horns I gave them, BUT I tried it out and I was able to get it to work for at least the bottom halves of the heads, if that makes sense! So we can at least work with that!

• As for the hat and facial details, I decided to go for a more feminine cog, by having the constellations double as lips (working in rules of 3 for the mouths, you can see how they look with each of their mouths closed), and trying out a more feminine secret agent hat!

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And there you have it, all five of our generalists and their design process! It’s honestly quite incredible how such a small, off-the-hook idea grew to become a staple in the way we handle our battles. I’m so glad that everyone has enjoyed the showcasing of these special suited superiors, and can’t wait to see how people interact with all the other generalists!

Until next time, and thank you for reading!