I was honored to be commissioned to paint and design environments for Shakerbot Studio. By the time I started working, there were some backgrounds already created for me to use as baselines for my own work. In addition there were some environments written down and described that the clients had wanted but didn’t flesh out visually yet, so this is where I came in to help them out!

Concept Painting of robots making sushi at a cyberpunk Japanese Shrine style restaurant

PLOT

The game centers around a protagonist, tired of his monotonous life, who stumbles into a hostess bar. During my discussion with the game developers, they were interested in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world that centered around the theme of water. The places that could be visited in the game were all related to animals that live in the sea, for example, Seahockey and Slugball were inspired by sea slugs. So with that prompt, I went ahead and created the world of mixology!

LIMITATIONS

One thing that was the most challenging about this project was definitely being restricted to ground-level views. Dramatic angles would make the piece too distracting and not fit with the characters when playing the game. Instead, a huge emphasis was put on world design, color, and lighting rather than extreme compositions. The other limitation was the predetermined locations the clients wanted for the game. After a couple of group discussions, we landed on an idea where we could combine aquatic animals with the locations to help emphasize the theme of water. There was definitely an open discussion on which aquatic animals should to mix with the environments, but the rest was up to me to brainstorm and show work to the clients.

1ST LOCATION: FORTUNE FISH

The main idea for this piece was radioactive fish. I believed that a goldfish would really match the vibe I was going for. Their tails are like a spirit and feel more animated as they moved. As mentioned earlier, there was predetermined locations already set, so the clients had wanted a shrine to be a location. We discussed that perhaps repurposing an old abandoned shrine into a sushi restaurant would be a cool idea. Bringing in sci fi elements with the lights and electrical components, combining old architecture with newer reinforcements and purposeful interior elements.

The main questions I focused on:

One of the main focuses of this piece was to press play.

How would the environment move if I was actually there?
How would you incorporate Japanese shrine traditions into the design of the props?
What sort of colors would you associate with radioactive?

These questions helped me focus on the theme and make the design purposeful.

3/4 Shot of Revamped Cyberpunk themed Japanese Sushi restaurant

Fortune Fish Background Concept Thumbnails

2ND LOCATION: OIL SPILL FILMS

This piece was centered around the theme of a squid mixed with a movie theatre location.

Main points in creating this piece

Like the number of legs on a squid, the environment has 10 entrances including the main entrance.
A lot of squid motifs were done for this piece, especially some of the designs for the props were all inspired by a more exaggerated style of a squid’s silhouette. Even down to the hand railing, everything is squid-related. If I were to expand the concept I would add corridors beyond each door to further emphasize the legs of the squid.
I also wanted to include elements of art nouveau into architecture style, in contrast to the 1st location, the client wanted more of a steam punk feel to the work. So I thought it would be interesting to experiment and combine the curvature of squid legs with the organic curves found in art nouveau architecture. Also I wanted each location to have a distinctive color, so that not every area was necessarily always blue because of the water theme, this helped with distinguishing which area the character was in and I thought it would be interesting to explore water themes through shapes and props rather than just through color. I cooled down most of the reds in the shadow areas and used warm lighting that is normally associated with movie theatres.

Detailed Line Art of a Ornate Movie theatre entrance

The rest of the images are some of the work I did for Mixology.

Locations that were explored

Citrus Fruit + Office, which represented the Citronic head corporation for creating the bots in the world.
Frogs and Lily pads + Mall created Lily pad mall
Sea slugs + Arcade created Sea hockey and Slugball, a neon arcade location with organic structures.