Mockup of the battlefield (characters by Roofkat Games)
Escaping Atlantis is a tactical RPG currently in development by Roofkat Games. The player recruits quirky Atlanteans and leads them against dangerous monsters from the deep, while trying to keep both their giant turtle and their Atlantean friends alive.
During pre-production, I conducted research on the looks of the flooded world of the game and visualized how the battlefield could look like.
The style of the game (rough lineart and mostly flat colours) was developed in an earlier sprint. We found the tone of the artwork too happy to fit the apocalyptic theme of the game, however, so I desaturated the colours and experimented with different weather conditions.
Visual Hierarchy research: how can we focus on the right elements?Final mockup of the battlefield (characters by Roofkat Games)
Mockup with my design placed in (UI by JoTo Games)
I was asked to design enemies for an unreleased mobile fighting game by JoTo Games. In this game, the player is forced to fight an endless stream of enemies in a simulation.
The designs I made all belong to the Beetle Clan: samurai-like fighters with insect and demonic elements.
Since I started freelancing, it has become a yearly tradition to design my own Christmas cards each year. I got the idea of designing a Christmas-related creature in 2020 and now I’m trying to come up with creatures for the most wonderful time of the year every time!
Christmas Card 2021
2021’s card featured a candle-bearing crab creature.
Christmas Card 2020
2020 featured a Christmas Ball mimic.
For 2020, I put in extra effort figuring out how this creature would roll up as a ball, so I understood its shape as well as possible before starting on the final illustration.
Apart from the sketches above I also made a proxy model in blender to make sure I got the perspective correct, as well as enabling me to play around with the lighting.
A client asked me to illustrate a 13th century knight, who was disowned by his lord and lives alone with his barn owl in a forest. Historical accuracy was very important, so I made sure to research the equipment and crossbows of that period.
This character was designed for a collaborative publication called Character Design Zine 2020, featuring all kinds of characters designed by artists all over the world. I decided to design an anthropomorphic goat to stand out from the rest, hopefully!
At first sight, Ramsey seems a senile old man, complaining about back aches and today’s youth. Under the well-worn cloak hides a sly smuggler with every forbidden good of the galaxy in his ship’s cargo.
During the Battle of Veluw, his home planet, an unfortunate hit on his head costed him one of his beloved horns and gave him almost permanent headache in return. Ramsey then used his whole stolen fortune to have the ancient artisans of Hircus make him a custom lightsword to fit on his broken horn.
The lightsword, known as the Electric Scimitar, channels headache into electric discharges.
I worked with Roofkat on a yet unannounced game project. The game is not to be expected to go in production soon; my task was to create two mockups showing what the finished game could look like. These mockups could eventually help pitch the game to a publisher.
The turnaround time of this project was only four weeks; it involved a lot of quick decision-making. Despite this short amount of time, we were able to explore quite some ideas and solidify a possible style for the game.
My submission for January’s Character Design Challenge on Facebook. The theme was cormorant fishing, a traditional fishing method in China and Japan using trained cormorants. A snare around their neck prevents them from swallowing too large fish, enabling the fisher to snatch them from the bird.
For this challenge I imagined a cormorant shaman, going out on the river to thank the river spirits for today’s good catch.
At Abbey Games I had the opportunity to work on the last DLC for Renowned Explorers. This became The Quest for the Holy Grail, an Indiana Jones themed expansion set in the Middle-East. I worked on character portraits and animations, but also event illustrations and some props for an unused arena.
The Quest for the Holy Grail was released on 13th December 2018 as a free expansion to whoever who already owned the Renowned Explorers: International Society base game.
Event pictures – background illustrations of various locationsPortraits of generic villager non-playable charactersDesigns for the DjinnsDesign sketches of the Djinn Princess, along with her in-game portraitDesign sketches for the Infrit Sorcerer and in-game portraitAll the poses and animations I made for the Infrit Sorcerer
During my internship at Abbey Games I mainly worked on their upcoming game Godhood. In this game, players create their own religion through commanding the people’s virtues and vices. The people are inspired to construct temples, and prepare disciples to convert unbelievers in special battle rituals. The gameplay is similar to sports management games, with automatic battles and training disciples for those battles.
The game was not yet in production, so my work mainly consisted of creating sketches and idea iteration, as well as creating test assets. A lot of the work shown on this page has been changed since and is not present in the final game.
Temples and Shrines
I was asked to design various buildings in the game, such as the temples used as training grounds for the disciples. The gameplay changed a lot around these training facilities; in the beginning each stat had it’s own temple design, whereas later players could choose which stat they wanted to dedicate a temple to.
Sketches for various statues and monuments.
A temple complex with different extensions, each acting as an upgrade to the shrine, improving it’s ability to train disciples in the game.
Early in the design progress, we mixed and matched the extensions to see what looks best.
As a test, we decided to take one of our shrine designs to a final level of polish to get familiar with the asset production pipeline. Creating a final asset in Abbey’s game engine involved creating multiple images per asset: each object has a diffuse, normal and hight map layer which gives the 2D assets a distinctive 3D feel.
First iteration of the Shrine of the Leopard. The shrine was designed as such that players could choose between different animals to dedicate the shrine to.
Morning
Afternoon
Night
Residential Buildings
Sketches for early game buildings. The idea was to start with wooden structures which could be upgraded to stone buildings later in the game, but this proved to be too costly.
Disciples and villagers need a place to sleep, too. So we designed houses for them, which they would build themselves instead of the player. We also came up with the idea that villagers would build places of entertainment according to the virtues of your religion. In a religion of love, for example, brothels might appear between the villager houses.
Sketches of residential buildings.
Finished residential house assets.
Sketches of villager buildings; marketplaces, spas and taverns.
Nature Assets
An overview of the asset designs and finished assets I made.
At the end of my internship I worked on a new pass of nature assets. We researched tropical rainforest vegetation as well as how to create good-looking normal maps for round, organic shapes.
Morning
Daytime
Evening
Night
Note that not all assets in these screenshots are made by me, only the ones in the first image. Apart from actual vegetation assets, we also experimented with the texture of the ground plane.
More information about the game Godhood can be found on Steam. The game was announced to enter Early Acces in July 2019 and is fully released as of 11 August 2020.
