Bonus Content Disc/Creatures: Keepers

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Creatures of Mass Effect: Keepers" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

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Derek Watts: Early on in the game, while we were still developing some of the levels, the look of some of the planets, the designers had a creature they had pretty well finalized. They were called the keepers. They were the ones who took care of the Citadel. They were kind of like the janitors, the mechanics. They took care of the whole thing. So this was going to be an ambient creature that you would see throughout the level, and then they were going to play a pivotal part at the end of the game, which changed a bit to the final. So these are some early concepts of what that creature was going to look like. This is a character that was drawn up. A lot of these were just quickly drawn up in pencil, and then we were trying to decide actually how they looked, what the designers wanted from them when they worked with the story. So this was an early attempt. It just had some kind of interesting legs that would kind of balance it on the ground, multiple arms and limbs.

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Derek Watts: This is another concept for the keeper, and after we did a few, we started showing them to the designers, and they started to tell us that actually the keepers were supposed to be this very docile race, not menacing at all. They're almost like puppy dogs taking care of the base. So as you can tell, if you saw this guy taking care of the base, you'd want to blow his head off immediately with a shotgun. So we had to kind of incorporate that into some of the designs.

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Derek Watts: So this one here was starting to get a bit less menacing. We were trying to figure out how many limbs... Four arms we thought was a pretty good idea. Maybe the animators didn't think that was a good idea, but we thought it was kind of an interesting character. So one thing we kind of noticed with this was we needed a bigger head, maybe some larger eyes so you could actually have some feeling for it.

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Derek Watts: This is starting to get closer to what we wanted. We were playing around with how the legs worked. So we wanted four legs, we wanted four arms, some bigger eyes. Probably something we needed was maybe a mouth so it looked like it could communicate. Probably take some of the joints out of the legs. There's just too many in here that kind of made it odd-looking when it was balanced above his legs.

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Derek Watts: This one here, we started to like the body. Maybe the legs were just too sharp, the way the feet were working... I mean, he ran around in Citadel, it's all polished steel. This guy would be sliding all over the place and if he's not sliding, he'd be chipping the hell out of the surface, that's for sure. But the thing we kind of liked about this guy was he's actually reading this little ticket there, and I thought it was pretty cute.

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Derek Watts: So drawing over the last design, we left the feet, kind of thickened them up a bit. Started to work the head a bit more, thicken up the limbs, get more of a kind of a mouth in there. Looking at a lot of insects, mosquitoes, bugs, praying mantis, those kind of things.

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Derek Watts: And obviously this one here, I didn't listen to the designers because we still have the sharp feet. Again, just trying a different head on this one. That's about all I changed on this.

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Derek Watts: So this one here was starting to get a lot closer. We left kind of like the sharper feet but just added these toes on there, so it almost like softened it up as it walked along. Put larger eyes on it, give it a bit more feeling; put this little vest on there, little backpack that he could communicate with people. Little antennae; looks like he's cleaning. At this point we had the vest but we ended up changing it to more of like a draped material on there. People were wondering how he zips that thing up, which makes sense. I don't know how he does that either.

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Derek Watts: So this is pretty well the final design for the keeper. You can see that we've changed the vest a bit. It's more of like a draped vest over top of him. We've got the color insect green, why not? We've put those toes on there. The backpack, we just kind of cleaned up the design a bit, made it easier for the model to actually see what was going on in there. And this is one of the first creatures we built. We put him in the game, walking around, one of the first things the animators did, and he actually made it to the final game. Turned out really well.