Mini Blimps

The Mini Blimps was a really fun design challenge. The designers wanted a small patrol blimp that could police the city. When you raised the alarm the blimps would fly over and rain down fire from above so that you couldn't just hide on roof tops. I wanted to make them very maneuverable so I added two rotating fans in the front so that they could turn instantly at any angle. I also wanted to hint at the Nazi's use of jet engines by giving the blimp a suedo jet engine. It has a large air intake in the front and a series of fans to create that intense thrust but it's large size would prevent it from moving to fast. In the end the blimps were scaled back to something more traditional but they kept the same tail design and a similar feel.

Dopplesieg

The Dopplesieg Factory has an important lore in the Saboteur. Its where the Nazi's are secretly developing Rocket technology similar to the real life V2 rockets. The facility is disguised as a car factory but it really serves as a weapons developement facility, and is personally run by the villain of the game, Kurt Dierker. You can see many of my iterations below that range from shuttle launching station to a rinky dink warehouse. Ultimately the final design was influenced heavily by the monolithic modern Mercedes buildings. Its final direction is very utilitarian looking, but with sheik details. Thanks to game designer Michael Marzola who I collaborated with when designing Dopplesieg.

Valhall: Secret Rocket Base

The Valhall base was my personal project for the length of at least 3 years. As soon as I had heard about it I was salivating to get my hands on it, so I gathered the writer and game designers, and started working out were we could go with Valhall. At the begining the base was to be built directly inside a enormous snowy mountain that eclipsed all other mountains. It had to have a missile silo for firing the Nazi's WMD's and a large number of rooms for the construction of missiles,. It had to house faculty and administrators. It had to have a generator room for power, a jail cell, and a medical facility. A control room to fire the rockets, a gandola to approach the base, and a Nazi castle on the mountain surface. Needless to say it was a humongous undertaking but I was really excited by the challenge and I worked hard at it for along time. As with all projects things were constantly changing and evolving as I was developing the ideas, so it gave me a really great oppertunity to collaborate with many designers and world builders throughout the process. I couldn't have done it with out the help of Lee Souder, Justin Lewershttp://justinlewers.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2002-09-14T01%3A04%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=5 and Joe Myers who were all instrumental in developing our ideas.The project had a great collaborative spirit and the project was better for it. Unfortunately Valhall was cut towards the end of the development of the game which was heartbreaking, but I was happy to have worked with such great people.

I hope you enjoy viewing the work as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Valhall: Control Room

These concepts were some of the iterations of the control room. we ended up going with something like the top piece here. I really wanted to retain the subterranean lair feel which is why everything is over reinforced and you can see rock bits coming through in places.

Valhall: Missile Silo

The missile silo and construction rooms were really inspired by the subterranean mountain lairs of Bond villains. I really wanted to give that cold, almost convoluted industrialized feeling. When we were talking about the size of the missile there was a desire to go over the top and scale back if necessary, so we made the rockets almost like Saturn V rockets. This ensured that any facility with rockets would be immense and overwhelming. The bottom drawings were my attempt to describe the function of the construction rooms on paper. I'm not sure if it translates ;)

Valhall: Medical Facility

Valhalls Med lab was designed for purpose of conducting experiments on human subjects. As such I wanted to give a horror like tone which is why I used eerie green and blood splatter everywhere. I also wanted to suggest that the green vats were some sort of super human serum they were tying to develope. I wanted it to look like the occult part of the Nazi mythology. In the operating room I made it colloseum like so that Nazi officials could watch the experimentations first hand experiments first hand.

Valhall: Various Rooms

This last part of Valhall is a collection of various rooms within the mountain base. Starting with the jail cell which houses the prisoners to be operatated on. I also wanted to design Dierkers personal office within Valhall to be as upscale as possible because Dierker is a vain character. We were even playing with the idea of giving him his own personal car showroom next to his office. There are hallways and transitions that were needed between rooms and lastly the drawing for the generator room which was to be a big mini boss fight, consisting of swaming Nazi's. Like I said before, Valhall was a labor of love, and I was sad to see it go. However I really enjoyed the experience of working with everyone to see our vision come together.

The Aurora

The Aurora is Sean's custom made racecar that Sean developes with his mentor Vitori Morini. In our game the Saboteur, the Aurora is the fastest engine ever built and the object of Dopplesiegs envy. At the begining of the game Sean races the Aurora against Dierker which sets up a rivalry between the two characters.
The design process for the Aurora spanned years and many variations. They wanted a car that could look period but clearly be cool and progressive. At the time we were developing it Sean was known in the world as the Dark Horse so that name helped inform my design decisions. I based the body off of the cigar shapes of the racecars of that era, and the head of a horse (stallion). I wanted it to sublimably suggest a Dark Horse, and also I wanted it to visually suggest that the Aurora was the first muscle car (horse power). the blue also signifies the Resistance who's color is blue. Below you can see some of the design variations that lead to the final design.