Idea

The contest itself was divided into two parts. The first part was for concept artists who each developed an idea into a finished concept that was judged separately. The second part was for production artists who either shaped their own idea or simply borrowed a concept from the first part and concentrated solely on production. I didn’t want to take someone’s concept as I had my own idea that I wanted to bring to life. And that’s how my work started, where my idea for the main feature was Matryoshkas!

Somehow I find this thing very funny, crazy and just cool. You can invent tons of cool ideas with them, especially for the environment. Many ideas didn’t make it into my final entry, and I want to get back to them some day. Alice: Madness Returns became an existing prototype of the atmosphere of madness while Dishonored 2 heavily inspired the in-game visual style.

It seemed to me that early Russian and Eastern architecture styles have many shapes in common—they are simple but also saturated with details. It was interesting to experiment by mixing them and see what happened.

I did a few fast sketches and the idea began to evolve, eventually becoming what you see in the final image.