Design Journey: The Worm Hunter (and friends)

Hello secret door club!

One of the creatures included in the Traveller's Guide to the Seasong Islands is the Worm Hunter. It's a quick and agile beast that hunts for worms hiding underwater in coral reefs. Seasong people have domesticated these creatures, and train them to flush those tasty worms out of their hiding spaces, and into the fishers' waiting nets!

What we wanted this creature to behave like was the easy part, but what it looked like took us on a bit of a journey.

The first set of sketches looked like this:

While we liked some of these (that shark puppy is adorable!) we thought that this direction was too cute all-together. We wanted a creature that felt like a hunter, reminiscent of a shepherd's or hunter's dog.

So we went back to the drawing board, and tried something more in that direction:

But now we'd gone too far in the other direction. It's too serious, and too much just like a dog (and in some cases: a dog with some fins stuck on). So we went back to the drawing board again, this time hoping to achieve a mix between the two.

And finally we have the collection that gave us our final design! While we like the idea of the shark-puppy and the penguin-parrots, we felt the long-haired creature here best captured the energy that we wanted this creature design to have.

We found our Worm Hunter!

Just for fun, here are the design journeys of the Snuffler and Sawbeak:

We hope you enjoyed this insight into our design process! It is not unusual for a design to take some time to come together - the Oceanic Snuffler and Sawbeak underwent similar processes, and the character Marlon Wallace took us weeks to get right - but in the case of the Traveller's Guide to the Seasong Islands, the Worm Hunter was the hardest to find.

What do you think about some of the Worm Hunter designs we didn't use?

Thank you for supporting the Secret Door Club!

Cheers,
- Niels & Rose