The Domovoi, a Twine game by Kevin Snow, has been released. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting my art and sketches from the game. If you haven't checked it out yet, please go take a look -- it's free and short!
Around the time that I began work on The Domovoi last summer, I was also playing through a PS2 RPG called Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land. It was a solid little dungeon crawler with a ton of neat ideas (some that actually influenced this year's Might and Magic X: Legacy), but one of the things that struck me the most was the wonderful art style. The game takes place in a ruined kingdom wracked by a recent supernatural calamity, and I thought that the visuals (particularly the hand-painted shop interiors) did a great job of capturing a quiet atmosphere of desolation and despair. There's a ghostly sort of quality to the artwork that I thought would be a good fit for The Domovoi as well.
Interesting side note: Katsuya Terada, the character designer and one of the principal artists on TotFL, is better known for the illustration work he did for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. His Zelda artwork influenced Kevin and George Kavallines in the Kou update for Matul Remrit.
Anyway, I liked TotFL a lot and began referencing it almost as much as period works by Russian artists. I don't think I was successful in capturing a hand-painted look, but I did draw a lot of inspiration from the muted, washed-out color palette and the moody lighting. I think the influence began to show most strongly around when I started drawing the spider.
Concept artwork for the spider, which diverged a lot from the original commission notes (which simply called for spider eyes and a web in the darkness). In one of our early conversations, Kevin talked about how The Domovoi was, in a way, a critique and subversion of the way choices are usually presented in games. This immediately put me in mind of Bioware (probably the industry's biggest offender when it comes to so-called "false choices"), which led to me trying to draw the spider using one of the typical "conversation cameras" from their later games:
(Okay, technically it's a KotOR 2 screenshot -- and stolen from one of the game's best LPs no less -- but all things considered I prefer having an Obsidian example sitting here.)
The final illustration.
I'm still a little bit unsure about how well the perspective reads in the composition. The thought would be that the "camera" would be set very close to the spider (who might be on some kind of ledge), and the rest of the elements are some distance behind her. I suppose she ended up looking a little big, but luckily Kevin didn't think it was a problem.
It took me a few tries to figure out the spider. It was my intention to make her look a bit mysterious, but not sinister or threatening -- she's only trying to look out for her brood, after all. I also tried to pose her forelimbs in what I hoped could be suggestive of someone trying to make a deal.
One of the many variations of the spider illustration.
A few things to note about the spider illustration: it's one of the more reactive sequences in the story, and it incorporates a lot of scenic details from the text (for instance, you can see the "unskilled cut" in the windowsill that gave her access). I ended up drawing more variations for the different possible states than any other illustration in The Domovoi:
- The web can be small, large, or broken, depending on whether or not the domovoi permits the spider to stay.
- The spider can be in the frame or gone, also depending on the above.
- The window can be intact or shattered, depending on the progress within the story.
It was sometimes a bit challenging keeping my Photoshop layers straight here, and Kevin and I had a minor panic when we realized we were missing a few states, but overall I learned a lot from managing all of these pieces.
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