Aleph the Librarian

During the early days of Valve, the fledgling company of around 20-so people thought it'd be a good idea to develop two games at once. The first was "Quiver" - a science fiction shooter taking cues from Doom, The Mist and The X-Files - and "Prospero" - a platformer/adventure game hybrid with big ambitions.

Prospero was envisioned as a surreal science fantasy epic with influences from Myst and Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges at its core. The player took the role of Aleph, a young woman with psionic powers tasked with saving an inter-dimensional library of pocket worlds from an alien intelligence. Aleph would travel many strange worlds and battle distorted facsimiles of herself using psionic weapons. The game would also feature user-created worlds as a prominent feature as supplemental content. Players were to create their own worlds and distribute them across the internet, with each copy of the game acting as a server host.

This was a game intended to be made by 15-20 people in 1997 on the Quake engine.

Prospero developed as far as having in-game screenshots released, but Quiver - now renamed to Half-Life - became the dominant Valve project and Prospero was eventually shelved indefinitely. Many elements of Prospero were integrated into Half-Life such as music, level geometry, world textures, sound effects and visual effects.

Prospero's legacy quietly continued after Half-Life became the dominant Valve IP in 1998 - the planned world-sharing system can be seen as a precursor to the Steam Workshop system, and former developer Karl Deckard has claimed that the game systems influenced Metroid Prime, Infamous 2 and Diablo III.

Of all the canned Valve projects, Prospero is one of the most eclectic and baffling - it's scope is both far ahead of its time and also immensely naive given the staff and technology Valve had available. If a playable build of Prospero ever surfaces, it'd very likely be a horrible experience to play - as the leaked 1997 0.52 Alpha build of Half-Life showed Valve still had a great deal to learn about game design and engine programming.

The character of Aleph, much like Prospero as a whole, has little information about her. From what can be gleamed from scraps available, she served as the curator of the library and was manifested by the library's own systems as a champion to defend it from an unspecified "intelligence". The only pisonic power she is seen to wield is a forcefield ability. Her name comes from the Borges novel The Aleph - which in turn is derived from a mathematical term used to describe the center of the universe.

For this model I moved away from the anime-esque proportions in her concept art and towards a higher fidelity, the sort of thing you may expect from mid-late 2000s character models, while still keeping a certain level of Japanese flair to honour the source material. The textures were a mix of photo materials and overpainting. Highlights and Ambient Occlusion were baked directly into the diffuse. Cards were used for eyelashes and to boost the hair mesh. I felt it was a waste to only have half a face visible, so I elected to sculpt a full head and hair. Half-Life 2's head meshes were a useful reference point for topology. For her likeness I referenced several Japanese actresses and singers, though the result is perhaps too generalized to be totally convincing. I had experimented with more stylized proportions, but they came off as uncanny valley. The hairstyle was another nod to the anime origins.

As an exercise in character model work, I would consider this project a success. I have no current plans to implement the model into a game engine, instead it can live on as a stepping stone in my progress as a digital artist.