Crysis 2
Concept Art and Sketches
Concept Art and Sketches
After Crysis (1) ended its development, pre-production work on Crysis 2 started almost immediatly. I was lucky enough to find myself part of the group that was to set the bar for enemy types and the alien visual design.
At the very beginning we had a very short brief and very little was expected, still riding on the succes from the original Crysis so there was'nt any sense of urgency but we still wanted to nail the whole life cycle and the sense of a visual hierarchy for the aliens.
Unused concept for the Crysis 2 aliens. The image shows one of many different design directions the concept art team explored.
An early version of what was to become the "Pinger" alien.
Another example of design directions being explored, early on the idea behind the aliens was that they had different stages in their life - early on in their life cycle the "younglings" would be able to fit into the biped suits, while other would be genetically engineered into larger beasts of war.
Another early experiment with an aquatic looking design, which in the end did'nt work out - but i thought it was cool looking nonetheless.
Before any serious development on Crysis 2 began, we formed a group across several departments which were tasked to come up with a number of enemy types for the game. Normally this would be a task solely kept for game designers and the like, but i was lucky enough to join this group and offer input on gameplay types for enemies.
The sketches here show a much more detailed and "behind-the-scenes" look at how our ideas were for the whole alien war machine, most of these ideas were kept unused though.
Idea sheet for the alien "drones" - the initial idea was that, just like in the ALIENS movie there was a clear hierarchy to the aliens.
Several other ideas were dropped because they weren't feasible for various reasons, one of my favorite though was the idea of the alien drone cradling inside the suit, and at random intervals when the player killed a drone soldier, the little guy would jump out of the suit in a last "kamikaze" like attack.
This sheet of ideas should give more insight into how we had planned the hierarchy to function - the Overseer was an idea that was largely brought on by the telekinetic enemy from half-life 2, an enemy that could've had even more potential during co-op play.
The L-Tag grenade launcher was one of the first weapons i worked on, a collaboration with 3D modeller Gregor Kopka who supplied the early rough mockup model.
Ammobox of some sort, this might be a relic from Crysis (1).
