Art Directing Death’s Gambit
Death’s Gambit is a Dark Souls inspired 2D action RPG created by myself and Jean Canellas.
The game was made in Gamemaker and the main tools I used were Photoshop, Spine, Premiere, and OBS.
Concept
The original concept back in late 2013 was a 2D sci-fi shooter with the core philosophy of Dark Souls. It still had elements of medieval fantasy, but guns were at the forefront of combat. This was a technical decision because we (rightfully) determined melee combat would be too difficult to program. About a month into development, we decided to tackle melee and the game started adopting a more medieval aesthetic.
The very first iteration of the game. In the top left you can see a sniper rifle pickup.
The first “vertical slice” of the game submitted to Indiecade.
The right screenshot was my first full art pass. The tiles don’t tile and the sense of depth is off, but even then the use of color was already attracting an audience.
“I'm all for heady video-game concepts, but sometimes all I need to see is a gif and I'm in.”
- Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku
At this time we had no sense of what the story was, and so much of what makes Dark Souls immersive is the history embedded in its world. It became increasingly important to have a narrative foundation to build the art on.
Fundamentally the game is an exploration of death and respawns. You can read more about my process for writing the story of Death’s Gambit here.
Death’s Gambit takes place in the kingdom of Siradon, a once prosperous city cursed by immortality through the machinations of an Eldritch God.
The protagonist seeks to be remembered, and though he meets an untimely demise, Death offers him a second chance if he agrees to break Siradon’s curse.
But as he delves further into the ruins of Siradon, the protagonist starts being influenced by whispers of a promise - Immortality.
Inspirations
I spent a lot of time studying these following works and developed a list of guiding principles to help define the world of Death’s Gambit.
Portray the fantasy of Princess Mononoke, the scale of Shadow of the Colossus (SoTC), and the darkness of Dark Souls.
A scene from Princess Mononoke.
Mononoke has an ethereal quality to it, representing nature as an untamed world, equally beautiful and dangerous.
In Death’s Gambit, nature represents the resilience of life. It is a cycle that cannot be stopped despite the antagonists desire to spread immortality. So while the kingdom has fallen to ruin, nature continues to grow, reclaiming monuments of Siradon’s former glory. These overgrown ruins are inhabited by wandering ghosts and human shaped trees, anomalies that push the haunting fantasy of Mononoke in our own twisted way.
SoTC inspires awe with both the sheer size of its colossi and the distinct architecture that populates its world.
Emulating this sense of scale was a monumental task both on the art side and game design side, but when it works in Death’s Gambit it achieves the desired effect of inspiring awe and fear.
A scene from Shadow of the Colossus.
Anor Londo from Dark Souls.
Dark Souls was our core thematic pillar for macabre, gothic, fantasy. It has all the elements of Mononoke and SoTC, from the fantastical to the awesome. What sets it apart is the dark tone — a terror contrasted against the fragile beauty of its world and characters.
So much went into designing each enemy, boss, and level to make sure it fit the tone of this dark fantasy where beauty and horror were two sides of the same coin and either could kill you just as easily.
Color
Above is the original pitch art I made when we first approached publishers. I wanted to captivate them with visuals of an epic journey across distinct biomes — showcasing moments of action and somber peace.
Giving each level a unique color palette was especially important since we were making a non-linear game with backtracking. Distinct landmarks and colors help players remember important locations, alleviating the annoyance of mindless wandering when they need to find their way back.
The game opens with warm autumnal tones and gradually gets cooler. By the later levels the dominant colors become progressively darker to reflect the protagonist’s depressing emotional journey.
“But inevitably the colors fade, and the world loses a little bit of magic every day you grow older.” - Death
In context this quote from Death is a reassuring speech, but it reveals a larger meta art decision that most players probably don’t realize — all the Eldritch Gods have no color.
The main message of Death’s Gambit is that life is beautiful because it’s fleeting, so we have to make the most of the limited time we have. The Eldritch Gods who wish to spread immortality drain life of its meaning, and with it, the colors.
Composition
When we first started making this game, I was determined not to use any tilesets — a decision I would later regret but ultimately made our game stand out. The intention was to make every scene feel like a painting. Now with our goal to portray scale, the camera would frequently zoom in and out to extreme lengths, necessitating enormous canvas sizes. With a dynamic camera in a movement heavy game, figuring out how to frame scenes became one of my biggest challenges.
I had two main references for how to go about achieving this. The first were these planar landscape paintings by renaissance artists like Hubert Robert (1733 - 1808).
I was immediately struck by how translatable they were to a side-scrolling game. From the perpendicular ground to the layered depth.
They used landscapes and architecture to form natural framing devices, directing the light and our eyes to specific points of interest.
They segmented the environment into distinct foreground, midground, and background elements, helping me figure out how to achieve parallax without destroying the frame.
The second set of references were Disney movies, particularly Sleeping Beauty (1959) and its concept art.
As an animated medium it had similar challenges to our game. But just like the renaissance paintings, it used the natural environment to frame characters and action.
Much of the art in Death’s Gambit is structured like the forest still from Sleeping Beauty. Boss arenas were the easiest to design this way since the explorable space was restricted. But even in the overworld, I found creative ways to frame moments big and small using arches and pillars, light and color.
The video below is a brief showcase of these ideas in motion.
Collaboration
Click here for a succinct thread on how I directed the animatic for Death’s Gambit, collaborating with the talented animators at Awesome Inc.