The Chinese Room animated Still Wakes the Deep creature movements by complete accident thanks to a timely bug.
Speaking at Develop: Brighton 2024, Still Wakes the Deep creative director John McCormack, project technical director Louis Larsson-De Wet, and associate art director Laura Dodds explained how the creature's movements came to be. It turns out a completely accidental bug in a tech demo helped determine how the creature should move, as well as its overall design.
Larsson-De Wet revealed that one challenge facing The Chinese Room's team was establishing how a "blob of flesh," which is essentially what the creatures are, moved. "There was this technical glitch where the physics freaked out and stretched this blob thing, and we've all gone 'that's it!'" the project technical director recalled of a tech demo for the creature.
"It was so unpredictable in the way that it moved," Dodds added. "It genuinely unnerved everyone, the way that it moved. The bug stretched out every part of it," McCormack said of the tech demo, adding that the remit for the creature's animations after that effectively became 'do that, again.'
Dodds also added that the accidental bug, and the creature movement that it created, influenced the overall design of the creature itself later on. Textures for aspects like the crew's clothes were made more fragmented, for example, and Dodds also believes also the unnerving animation helped the creature maintain its sense of power, which films sometimes struggle to maintain after revealing their creature.
There was also some debate over what the creature was actually referred to during development. "We did start with 'puppets,' because of the nature of what's happened. Something's come on board, it's ripped the crew apart and it's almost tried to put them back together. That was the original idea for them so they were originally called puppets," McCormack said.
The creature's tendrils, which pull hapless crew members off to be slaughtered during various points of Still Wakes the Deep, also factored into this moniker. What The Chinese Room definitely doesn't want you to refer to the monster as is the 'goop,' however. Please do not refer to it as the goop.
Read our full Still Wakes the Deep review to see what we made of The Chinese Room's horrific adventure.
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