Too much concept art? Probably not.

As we are currently in the pre-production phase of our game, concept art is our best friend. That said, we underestimated how much time we'd spend in this phase, not only iterating concepts but doing group critiques of our work. It is likely that concept work will still be going on in our ‘production’ phase. This dependence on basic sketches, color swaps, and iterative design comes from some important values:

• We want to create a unique game world, which takes imagination. There are 17 different 'imaginations' for us to navigate. That is a lot.

• We are inspired by real-world cultures. For example, we want to incorporate the Russian Revival architectural style into our game's 'village,' but we also want to portray elements of Tibetan and Mongolian culture and style. Research into these cultures is going into our art and narrative because we don’t want to be thoughtless about real cultural references.

• Our narrative and art are tied together. We don't have any sort of 'lore bible,' so the only way for players to learn extra, interesting facts is through dialogue and environmental storytelling – so all artwork needs to be created with this goal in mind.

It's an elaborate process that seasoned game designers will understand, but that we are just beginning to learn. Currently, we’ve created concept art for village homes, NPC villagers, and some environmental props. We have special concepts for four important NPCs that the main character interacts with, as well as the main character herself, and in some cases we have made it to the step of sculpting and modeling. We even made concept art for a little pig, because we’re just really excited to have a pig in our game.

Some of our art can be viewed in the gallery, so check it out – we’ve worked hard on it!