Puzzle Abyss | Environment design
I made the art for a whole game demo last winter!
The name's Puzzle Abyss. This is part of my contribution, here as an environment concept artist: an arcade title inspired by the intersection of futuristic aesthetics and human identity. Thank you Chris for the big big opportunity!
Iterated from start to finish the environment design. This enormous space station acts as a "floating tomb for the last vestiges of humanity". The circular structure acts as a frame for the cube part where the levels take places, and the camera can be rotated in all direction thus making the structure viewable from all internal angles. I pivoted my attention to the internal part of the structure for this reason, but the most interesting part for me was designing the shape as a whole. I wanted it to resemble the shape of those human cryonics capsules seen in sci-fi media, but I also took inspiration from bizantine and roman mausoleums. (mausoleo di Teodorico, mausoleo di Adriano)
Final version and study highlights. No pretty render for this one, just pure infinite iterations
Main structure exploration
The outer dome-like structures were created on Blender and refined on Photoshop
As the game focuses on stark contrasts between binary elements, the main environment inspirations follow through as they come from ancient roman architecture, as well as space-related structures.
Cubes exploration, aka: the main puzzle component
Pavement exploration
The moodboard I created, followed and fed with new data through the entire process