Art Spotlight – The Kraken

Hello everyone, Tyler James here with some exciting visuals from the upcoming campaign expansion!

Growing up, I always gravitated toward the villain in movies: Darth Vader, Pinhead, The Kurgan, General Kael. The list goes on and on. In some ways I think we might be drawn toward things that embody traits we don’t possess. If I were to put myself on the DnD alignment chart I’d be lawful neutral, so maybe these baddies are my inner yearning to add some spice in my life. You might be wondering, what does any of this have to do with HEX? Well I’ll tell you what, you can’t have a great hero without a great villain. In Chapter II I wanted to make sure the Kraken was as formidable an opponent visually as he was mechanically. Your tale as the hero of Chapter II can only be as triumphant as the evil you must overcome, and the Kraken is one nasty fella’.

You might recognize this art from the early days of Entrath. As a creative on HEX, one of the hardest things to do is control your urge to throw all your favorite archetypes into the pot. The Kraken was an itch we just couldn’t resist scratching, but it existed in isolation as a legendary card for a long time. With Chapter II, the Kraken is doing so much more as a dungeon boss. I felt like this was the perfect opportunity to reimagine the character and give it a uniquely Entrathian spin.

First things first, we needed some ideation. Cory and I worked together on some of the high level objectives with the redesign. We knew we wanted something that looked large, dangerous and relatable. The first two on that list are fairly straight forward but the last one, relatable, is one of the trickier challenges. However, it is a very important part of character design. You are essentially looking to integrate enough design language so your audience can connect the dots between the new things they are looking at with things they know that embody the right traits. It all sounds pretty intuitive and obvious when you lay it out on paper, but it has to be a conscious effort on the part of the concept artist to tap into the right nodes of our subconscious. While I was fairly certain about the more micro level details of the creature – dolphin and squid skin, tentacles, bio luminescent elements, etc. – I wasn’t certain on the overall skeleton. After working through some iterations, it became clear that giving the monster a few human-like skeletal traits helped elevate his presence and suggest an intelligence more befitting and frankly more frightening for such a large creature. With the sketch locked in, we were ready to begin work on the final artwork for the Kraken.

We enlisted one of the very talented artists on HEX, Chuy De Leon, to create the final artwork for the Kraken. You may recognize his work elsewhere in our game. He brought you most of the nodescapes, the tiny little environment paintings you see in the details panel as you adventure around the campaign. With his great eye for composition, values, colors and texture, I knew he was a great fit for this piece. We went back and forth a couple times getting all the details down.

He also worked with our partners at Gameforge to make sure this piece was trailer ready. This involved cutting up elements into separate layers so they could parallax and animate. It was a ton of work but that extra mile really paid off. The final artwork is stunning.

Last but not least, we can’t forget about the dungeon map itself. The Kraken dungeon map artwork has been public for quite some time now and, while it remains mostly the same, I felt we had some work to do in order to get it looking its best for the new expansion. Some of these old maps from the early days of HEX were created with a slightly different sensibility than we have now. They were initially thought of as more of a static game board, but now we think of them more as a literal representation of your location in the world. For this reason, we removed the Kraken visual from the map, and I brought in a ton more detail overall to help immerse you more as you fight your way through Kraken’s Cove. Here are some before and after images of the work done on the Kraken dungeon map.

I’m very excited to get all this new content into the hands of our dedicated HEX players. The campaign holds a very special place in my heart, and I’m excited to see just how far we can take this experience. Until next time, keep on Hexing friends!

-Tyler

P.S. Anyone want an AA Kraken card? I wonder how one might get their hands on this tasty treat?

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