In DEEPWARD, you don't just switch weapons during a fight. You switch between three characters. So how do you get that across in a single picture, especially one you'll often see as a tiny thumbnail on Steam? That's what we were figuring out with artist James Child while working on our new capsule art. Here's a look at how it came together:
Before we started drawing, we went through a bunch of guides and took a closer look at the artwork other games use on Steam. We wanted to understand what works and why. One thing kept coming up: you need to know where to look first. The trouble was, we had three main characters and wanted all of them in there. Bruno got the main spot. A guy who's two metres tall and carrying a massive Gatling gun is pretty hard to miss. He was still too small in the first sketches, though, so we made him bigger. Tony and Vireth took their places on either side. And since you're heading deeper and deeper in the game, we put the whole crew on their way down a staircase. For the Gothic background, we looked through photos of Victorian staircases and interiors. The first poses looked a bit like they were out sightseeing. We needed them to look ready for a fight. So we worked on their stances, weapons and expressions. Tony wasn't supposed to be the nice guy from his current portrait in the game. We wanted someone whose revolver you really wouldn't want pointed at you. We're planning to redraw those portraits too. With Vireth, we were going for confident, attractive and dangerous. Some versions looked a little unsure of themselves. Others looked far too angry. At one point, she and Tony were starting to look more like the villains, so we dialled it back a bit. Meanwhile, Bruno ended up with such huge hands that he reminded us of a mole, and the Gatling gun looked like a toy next to them. Thankfully, James fixed that one pretty quickly. By the way, we're already working on a new version of the gun itself. But we'll save that for another time. The logo was a whole other thing. We wanted it hand-painted so it would fit the artwork. Sharp points, uneven shapes, something a little unsettling. But for quite a while, our idea of dripping letters just looked like melting wax instead of metal. Once we got it looking metallic, we had another problem. It was too clean and polished. It felt more like something from a traditional fantasy game than DEEPWARD. So we added scratches, cracks and chipped edges. We wanted it to look like it had been through something. Every now and then, we'd shrink the whole picture down to the size you'd actually see on Steam. That made it pretty obvious what was disappearing into the shadows and whether you could still read the name. The main artwork and logo are together now. We still need to sort out the vertical versions, which means adjusting the poses so the whole crew fits. We'd also like to try a few layouts with Tony or Vireth taking the main spot. Thanks to James for the painting and all the revisions. Now we're curious: who caught your eye first, Bruno, Tony or Vireth?